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RECONSTRUCTION 
AND NATIONAL LIFE 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK ■ BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lm 

TORONTO 



RECONSTRUCTION 
AND NATIONAL LIFE 



BY 

CECIL FAIRFIELD LAVELL, Ph.D. 

(Columbia/' 
Associate Professor of History, Grinnell College 



J!2eto gotfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1919 

All rights reserved 



*# 



Copyright, 1919 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Bet up and electrotyped. Published, April, 1919 



MM -7 W* 



©CI.A525369 



A^O 



FOREWORD 

Reconstruction is not, to an American, a word of 
the happiest associations. To even a superficial stu- 
dent of American history it means one episode and one 
only, an episode to which no southerner can yet refer 
without heightened color, no northerner without dis- 
comfort. But we do not recall such a memory to pro- 
mote pessimism — only to remind ourselves that it was 
reconstruction of the South by the North that failed 
and that proved more destructive than the war itself. 
The reconstruction that succeeded was undertaken by 
the South and was carried through in spite of all handi- 
caps. And the reminder may help us to estimate the 
permanent and the passing, the fundamental and the 
external in the Europe of 19 19. For it may be that 
some of us watch too exclusively the labors of the Con- 
gress at Paris and ignore the pathetic and powerful 
struggles of the people of Europe for security, free- 
dom and self-realization. 

The problem of reconstruction may be approached 
from two angles. One phase of it is necessarily some- 
what formal and external. Wounds have to be healed, 



vi FOREWORD 

deformities have to be removed, frontiers have to be 
redrawn along national lines, rival claims have to be 
considered where nationality is mixed or doubtful, new 
states that were formerly parts of the German, Aus- 
tro-Hungarian or Russian Empires have to be delim- 
ited and recognized, and form must be given to the 
League of Nations. The other phase is even more 
complex and fundamental. It involves the renewal of 
normal lines of life and progress by all the nations in- 
volved in the war, the picking up of strained and 
broken threads, the reconsideration by each people of 
its own problems after the tremendous crisis that is 
now past. 

The formal, diplomatic phase is the one that pri- 
marily concerns the Peace Congress at Versailles. Its 
difficulties are in theory not particularly formidable, 
for the most part, for the settlement must proceed on 
principles universally admitted. The practical diffi- 
culties, on the other hand, are enormous, and can be 
removed only by a minute knowledge of the facts and 
by infinite tact. But however carefully we may en- 
deavor to follow and understand this external side of 
reconstruction we are in the main powerless to aid or 
hinder. All we can do is to clarify the issues in our 
minds and try to grasp the most essential facts. 

The more subtle and far-reaching phase of recon- 



FOREWORD Vli 

struction is that implied in self-determination, the 
problem imposed on each people of facing its own is- 
sues, reconsidering its own aims and lines of advance. 
In this we cannot always give mutual aid in a direct 
and material way, but we can aid in sympathy and un- 
derstanding. And if this kind of aid, intangible, spir- 
itual, immensely powerful, is to be rendered intelli- 
gently we must above all things try to know the char- 
acter and the problems of the peoples with whom we 
are to be associated in our League of Nations. For 
whatever form the League may take and however that 
League may be modified in the years to come it will 
stand or fall not mainly through formal merits or for- 
mal weaknesses but through the degree to which it suc- 
ceeds in " organizing the friendship of the world." 

It is this latter phase of reconstruction that I have 
had chiefly in mind in the chapters that follow. They 
rest on the conviction that important as the formal work 
of the Peace Congress may be there is a more funda- 
mental and permanent work of reconstruction that 
must fall on each nation, not a reconstruction that will 
be built on the deceptively tangible foundation of maps 
and treaties but a reconstruction built on the hopes, 
the convictions, the struggles, the dreams of the peo- 
ples. The basis of such reconstruction is not to be 
found in documents or institutions, for it is a living 



Vlll FOREWORD 

and dynamic basis, and the structure will not be one 
that may be completed in a year ; its foundations have 
been shaping for centuries, and none of us will live 
to see the work receive its final touch. But in the 
meantime we may aid in the building by knowledge, 
sympathy and good-will. And our first step must be 
the study of the foundations on which the anxious and 
wearied peoples of Europe are to build, the solid and 
yet ever changing foundations of human life in its 
struggle toward a social ideal. 

Of the need for such a study we are earnestly con- 
vinced. For the isolation of the United States is 
broken, and apparently broken forever. The Atlantic 
has been bridged, or rather it has become to America 
what the Channel has been to England for a thousand 
years. It still separates us from Europe, but we no 
longer have the illusion that the troubles of Europe 
are the troubles of another planet. It was always an 
illusion. There was never a time when the affairs 
of peoples so closely akin to us in blood, in traditions 
and in thought did not matter to us. Not only has the 
stream of immigration never stopped, not only have 
all of us friends or relatives who were born in Britain, 
Germany, France, Italy, Russia and the remotest cor- 
ners of the older world, but our reading and thinking 
of every day brings us into touch with the lands and 



FOREWORD IX 

peoples across the sea. We were all really aware of 
this before the war. But the old condescension of Eu- 
rope toward America had been replaced by a more 
arrogant condescension of America toward Europe, 
and we assumed an attitude of lofty remoteness, an 
attitude born of conviction both of security and of 
superiority. That attitude, we may hope, is gone for- 
ever. And now it is necessary to turn with frank in- 
quiry and with sympathy to the effort to understand 
our overseas kindred whose tragedies we have in some 
measure made our own. It is not enough to have 
American representatives in the Peace Congress or to 
send Commissions. Each of us must try to clear away 
the fog of ignorance and prejudice that blinds our 
eyes, and to understand the problems that Europe has 
been facing in past years and is facing still. For we 
at last see that those problems are our own, and that in 
the burden of their solution we must bear our share. 

To this effort toward the understanding of the living 
basis of Europe's problem of reconstruction I have 
contributed only an introductory survey, hardly more 
indeed than the statement and illustration of a point 
of view. To this end the scope of the book has been 
limited, except for the first chapter, to the study of 
four peoples, the French, the German, the Russian, 
and the British. A bibliography has seemed hardly 



X FOREWORD 

necessary, but the student will find it advisable to have 
within reach any good history of modern Europe, such 
as Hayes, Political and Social History of Modem 
Europe (Macmillan, 19 17), or Schapiro, Modern and 
Contemporary European History (Houghton Mifflin, 
19 18). And he will find constant stimulus and help 
in Arnold Toynbee's two books, Nationality and the 
War and The New Europe (Dent, London, and E. P. 
Dutton, New York, 191 5-6). 

G F. L. 
Grinnell, Iowa, 
March 10, 19 19. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Foreword v 

I The Problem: Europe's Unsettled Questions i 

II Revolution and Readjustment in France . . 17 

III The French Revolution and National Life . 37 

IV The Basis of Reconstruction in Germany . 56 

V Idealism in German Politics 74 

VI The Russians and the Dawn of Russian Free- 
dom 92 

VII The Russian Problem and the Revolution . 114 

VIII British Liberty and the Empire 141 

IX The New Idealism in England 165 

Afterword: Nationalism and International- 
ism 182 



RECONSTRUCTION AND 
NATIONAL LIFE 



The Problem: Europe's Unsettled 
Questions. 

The student who is seeking for some basis for the 
reconstruction of Europe in the history of the nine- 
teenth century will find the grouping of his facts con- 
trolled mainly by four great phenomena — the growth 
of nationality, the growth of democracy, the expan- 
sion of Europe, and the industrial revolution. None 
of these, with the exception of the last, were of recent 
origin. The expansion of Europe began four hun- 
dred years ago with Columbus and Vasco da Gama, 
and before the end of the .eighteenth century North 
and South America were already committed to the 
domination of peoples of European stock, the British 
were masters of a large part of India, and the Russian 
Empire reached a long arm across Siberia to the Pa- 
cific. Similarly, nationality and democracy are not 



2 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

new ideas : Swiss, Dutch, and English patriots fought 
for their country centuries ago, and both national feel- 
ing and the idea of government by the people go back 
at least as far as Marathon and the Athenian demos. 

But the nineteenth century saw " imperialism " as- 
sume a new and tremendous significance with the 
completion of the British conquest of India, the Rus- 
sian advance into central Asia, the colonization of 
Australasia, the partition of Africa, and the rapid 
rise of the overseas dominions to wealth and power. 
At the same time nationality and democracy have come 
to have a force and significance in the world since the 
French Revolution that they had never had before; 
nations have moved toward self-consciousness and 
freedom on a mighty and unprecedented scale until 
they have quite displaced the monarchs of a century 
ago in the sovereignty of Europe. And the industrial 
revolution is quite narrowly and definitely modern. 
It began in the eighteenth century, and since James 
Watt drew out his first patent in 1769 mechanical sci- 
ence, steam and electricity have changed the face of 
the world. 

All of these phenomena have brought with them po- 
tent forces of change and upheaval. With them have 
come new visions, new aspirations and fierce enthu- 
siasms. On the whole, no doubt, they have worked 
good rather than evil, but the one certainty is that they 



EUROPE S UNSETTLED QUESTIONS 3 

have wrought havoc with old standards and old tradi- 
tions, that they made possible the great war, and that 
they will quite largely dominate the process of recon- 
struction. Moreover — and the understanding of this 
is fundamental — they have nothing like reached 
completion. For an old social and political system 
dies slowly, and if it is true in a sense that the world 
is in a perpetual process of death and re-birth there are 
some periods — and the nineteenth century was one 
of them — when the process is peculiarly far-reaching 
and convulsive; the old stubbornly resisting dissolu- 
tion, the new persistently asserting its claims. When 
the twentieth century opened it saw the states of 
Europe still imperfectly adjusted to any of the new 
ideas that were every year growing more insistent, 
more certain of ultimate victory. Nationality partly 
coincided with state frontiers — but not wholly. The 
peoples were steadily moving toward control of their 
governments, but they were still far from the goal of 
a democratic Europe. Expansion had brought power, 
wealth, a widened horizon, and had brought also for- 
midable problems of government, terrible possibilities 
of jealousy, rivalry and arrogance. The industrial 
revolution had given the world incredible increase in 
production, miraculous means of communication and 
transportation, with the factory system, the centraliza- 
tion of industry, the conflict between labor and capital, 



4 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

the appearance of anarchism and socialism. The old 
regime was dying, perhaps, but it was not dead, and it 
clung obstinately to life. The new regime was fast 
learning and asserting its powers, but its victory was 
not yet final and its constructive aims were undeter- 
mined, still in controversy. 

For the widespread and growing conviction that the 
future belonged to the peoples, not to kings, nobles, 
aristocracies, was far from settling the question. 
" People " is a vague word. It by no means stood for 
a clear and homogeneous fact. The victory of na- 
tionality and democracy was postponed while classes 
and sections wrangled over details. The political lib- 
erty that was almost won was declared to be valueless 
without economic liberty. And the millions of men 
and women between the Atlantic Ocean and the Ural 
Hills seethed in uneasy life, unsure of their desires and 
their powers, sure only of a light that might dazzle 
but was still a light, a freedom that might bewilder 
and intoxicate but was still freedom, an ideal that 
might have a tantalizing way of assuming a myriad 
changing forms, but yet held the promise of a golden 
age. 

i. Let us consider the force of nationality first. In 
the course of the nineteenth century Italy and Ger- 
many, from being " geographical expressions " became 



EUROPE S UNSETTLED QUESTIONS 5 

united and highly conscious states, inspired by a na- 
tional feeling that was quite new, that had been non- 
existent when the French Revolution began, but that 
was fervent and apparently deep-seated. France had 
had many of the elements of national life under the 
Bourbon kings, but they were fused by the Revolution 
into a sentiment of new and tremendous power. Eng- 
land, Scotland, Wales and — more doubtfully — Ire- 
land, in their slowly cementing partnership, felt no 
sudden change, but even British nationality acquired 
a fresh vigor and clearness of conviction, and the 
spread of national consciousness through the British 
dominions overseas meant a significant widening of 
the whole idea as the same imperial patriotism showed 
itself in Melbourne, Winnipeg, Auckland and Cape 
Town. To Italy, Germany, France and the British 
Empire we may add all of the smaller states of Europe, 
not least those that had broken loose from the Turkish 
Empire only a few generations ago. In all, the theory 
of nationality, vague and sometimes ill-defined as it 
might be, was held with conviction; in all, state and 
nation, political and national boundaries, were sup- 
posed to coincide. 

But this theory by no means corresponded with fact. 
Russia and Austro-Hungary were the most conspicu- 
ous cases in point. Within their boundaries there was 



6 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

national sentiment, but it was divided and had little re- 
lation to government or boundaries. And even within 
the limits of the countries most strongly moved and 
controlled by the national spirit there were incon- 
sistencies and diverse elements that boded trouble. 
Italy felt that she was incomplete without the Tren- 
tino. France after 1871 mourned the loss of Alsace- 
Lorraine, Denmark the loss of Danish Schleswig. 
Within the German Empire were Poles, Danes and 
Frenchmen who passionately resented their inclusion 
in a political unit with which they felt no national bond. 
Even Great Britain had discomfort in the problem of 
Ireland. And the Balkan states surveyed their ar- 
rangement on the map with an indignant sense that 
their bounds had been set with no regard whatever 
to nationality, that the whole peninsula would have 
to be re-divided before they could be at rest. 

From the point of view of nationality, then, we can 
easily distinguish on the map of Europe certain 
" sore points," as it were — centers of unrest that 
might or might not provoke wars but certainly mer- 
ited consideration and would threaten the world's peace 
until they were settled. They were all relics of the old 
diplomacy. The Trentino had " belonged " to Aus- 
tria long before Italian unity was dreamed of, and it 
remained unredeemed. Poland had been divided to 



Europe's unsettled questions 7 

suit the convenience of Austria, Prussia and Russia, 
the consideration of nationality entering not at all into 
the calculations of the rulers who effected the parti- 
tion. Alsace-Lorraine and Schleswig were annexed 
to the German Empire for state reasons and by mil- 
itary force. Ireland had been conquered by England 
ages ago, had been semi-anglicized, and now proved 
difficult of national assimilation even when given free- 
dom and full partnership. And the Balkan prob- 
lems were problems resulting from work half done 
by the diplomats of the Great Powers, from the sullen 
restiveness of nations half given national existence 
and grudgingly left incomplete. There was an un- 
redeemed Serbia in the Austrian province of Bosnia, 
an unredeemed Roumania in the Austrian province of 
Transylvania and in the Russian province of Bessar- 
abia, an unredeemed Greece and Bulgaria in Mace- 
donia, just as there was an unredeemed France, an 
unredeemed Denmark, an unredeemed Italy, an unre- 
deemed Poland. And all of these meant restlessness, 
agitation, bitterness, the threat of war. 

2. The incomplete realization of democracy was a 
menace second only to that springing from incomplete 
or thwarted nationality. Here Britain (including Ire- 
land, of course, for the Irish have for years been as 
free as the English or the Scotch), France, Italy, Hoi- 



8 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

land, Belgium, Switzerland, the Scandinavian and the 
Balkan states may be left out of consideration. Not 
all had achieved complete democracy, but democracy 
was steadily moving toward realization with the goal 
in sight and no considerable obstacles in the way. 
As far as freedom and self-government were con- 
cerned these states presented no problem that could not 
be settled in peace and without bitterness. But put- 
ting aside what was left of European Turkey — a 
recognized anomaly that could be removed in only one 
way and that way quite inevitable — there were Rus- 
sia, the German Empire and Austro-Hungary, power- 
ful states in which the people were denied control of 
the government. In Germany and Austro-Hungary 
there were popular elements in more or less adequate 
representative assemblies, but in both empires a small 
governing class really controlled all the effective ma- 
chinery of state. In Russia the essential principle of 
government was autocratic, working through a pow- 
erful bureaucracy. The result was that in all three 
there was an active and growing revolutionary ele- 
ment, and observers in other countries felt that the ulti- 
mate victory of the revolution in central and eastern 
Europe was not only a mere matter of time but might 
well mean a civil conflict and a shock to the world. 
It might be a necessary and healthful shock, but a rad- 



EUROPE S UNSETTLED QUESTIONS 9 

ical change in the constitution of three great empires 
was a thing not to be contemplated without anxiety — 
just as even a necessary surgical operation may involve 
shock, suffering, and the chance of disaster. 

3. The question of expansion takes us beyond the 
geographical bounds of Europe, but we may warrant- 
ably consider it in its reaction on the parent continent. 
The conflict between expanding empires has been a 
familiar danger for ages. Even in modern times it 
is a common observation that the series of wars be- 
tween France and England, the second Hundred 
Years' War as Seeley called it, from 1689 to 181 5, 
became a duel for empire with mastery in America 
and India as the prize of the victor. The wars of 
1854-6 and of 1877-8 were due to Russia's expansion 
towards Constantinople; the nervous tension between 
Russia and Britain during the latter half of the nine- 
teenth century was due to anticipated conflict in Asia ; 
the war between Russia and Japan in 1904-5 was di- 
rectly due to expansion and collision; and the series 
of crises that culminated in the outbreak of war in 
19 14 largely turned on rival ambitions and jealousies 
in the Balkans, Asia and North Africa. At the open- 
ing of the twentieth century peoples of European stock 
so largely controlled the rest of the world that further 
expansion almost inevitably meant war. The British 



IO RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

flag flew over all of Australia, all of India, half of 
North America, a large part of south and central 
Africa, and islands and coasts beyond number. 
France was the mistress of Madagascar, Siam, and a 
huge dependency in north-west Africa. Latin- Amer- 
ican republics held all of south and central America, 
their independence jealously guarded by the United 
States. The United States of America had not only 
become the greatest power in the world outside of 
Europe but had extended American influence across 
the Pacific. Russia dominated north and central Asia. 

It is hardly necessary to point out the grave and 
complex problems involved in imperialism. But ex- 
cept for two of the European states it did not seem 
likely in 19 14 that these problems need disturb the 
peace of the world in the immediate future. The 
ancient rivalry between England and France was 
ended by the understanding reached in 1904. The 
more recent rivalry between England and Russia 
was settled, apparently, by the treaty of 1907. There 
were still dangers in the situation, but the only actual 
and impending menace came from the ambitions of 
Germany and Italy. 

Germany had secured in the scramble of the eighties 
only three sections of Africa, large in area but of 
doubtful value, and she held also a few islands that 
were of little importance without further acquisitions. 



EUROPE S UNSETTLED QUESTIONS II 

To erect a German colonial empire at all commensurate 
with Germany's position in Europe would be possible 
only through war and conquest, unless indeed western 
Asia might be relieved from Turkish rule, developed, 
and ultimately annexed. So the hope embodied in the 
Drang nach Osten became a cardinal factor in German 
politics, more evident with each year of the new 
century. But it involved the crossing of the Balkan 
peninsula, and this meant a threat against the inde- 
pendent nationality of the Balkan states and an al- 
most inevitable conflict with Russia. The south-west- 
ern push of Russia, the south-eastern push of Germany 
intersected. 

Second only to this in danger were the ambitions of 
Italy to control the Adriatic and to acquire part of 
North Africa. Her wrath at the French annexation of 
Tunis in 1881 had thrown her into the Triple Alliance 
with Austro-Hungary and Germany. Her disastrous 
adventure in Abyssinia, (1896) only persuaded her to 
look for colonies nearer home. Her conquest of Trip- 
oli in 191 1-2 was a dangerous portent. And her am- 
bition to make the Adriatic an Italian lake was an im- 
mediate menace to Austro-Hungary and a potential 
menace to Serbia. Here was a knot that might well 
call for the sword. And now that the sword has 
struck and has been returned to its sheath the knot is 
seen to be only partly cut. Even the collapse of the 



12 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

Austro-Hungarian Empire has not solved the problem 
of Trieste, and there still remain the rival claims of 
Italy, and the new Jugo-Slav state across the sea. 
Italy's dreams of expansion eastward would seem to be 
inconsistent with the national hopes of the Slavs of 
Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia. 

4. The industrial revolution had created a condition 
that might or might not issue in war indeed, but that 
might and did issue in political and social disturbances 
of the first magnitude. The effects of the change in 
production and distribution would alone have been 
enormous even if they had come about by some simple 
magic of science without the rise of factories and fac- 
tory towns. But the factory system had meant first 
the oppression and degradation of the laborer, then 
combination in unions, the gradual development of a 
social intelligence among the laborers, and the appear- 
ance of a state of affairs in which the relation between 
capitalists and laborers became one of armed neutrality, 
war, or peace based on treaties. 

Finally, as the world struggled to adjust itself to the 
situation, there appeared at least two new phenomena 
which still exist and are still in process. One is the 
extension of capitalism among the laborers themselves. 
The other is the appearance of a variety of social gos- 
pels among which that which goes under the vaguely 
understood word " socialism " is, no doubt pre-emi- 



Europe's unsettled questions 13 

nent. Fifty years ago socialism was sufficiently pow- 
erful to attract the thunderbolts of Bismarck. But 
they were launched in vain. The new program of 
economic and social upheaval waxed stronger under 
both persecution and the scorn of the elect, until now 
socialism has definitely appeared in international poli- 
tics. It is dominant, temporarily at any rate, in Ger- 
many and in Russia, and whether or not it retains its 
present forms it represents a force which cannot be 
ignored. Like incomplete and thwarted nationality, 
like incomplete and thwarted democracy, like the con- 
flict of expanding empires, the vigorous agitation of 
the classes hitherto without power in national direction, 
their demand for a more perfect economic organization 
of society, represents one of the world's unsettled 
problems. 

But partly arising from nationality, democracy, ex- 
pansion, and the industrial revolution, and partly 
springing from less tangible sources and currents, 
there is a movement of which socialism is only one 
phase, and that not necessarily the most important. It 
is a movement which will not formally appear, per- 
haps, in any diplomatic discussion nor be given a place 
in any treaty. And yet one who is studying the basis 
of reconstruction cannot ignore it. We might define 
it briefly, adapting Michelet's famous definition of the 
Renaissance (" the discovery of man, the discovery of 



14 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

the world") as man's discovery of humanity. And 
if this sounds vague and rhetorical it is because the 
movement itself has a vagueness and a tremendous po- 
tency that defies exact definition. How are we to de- 
fine the spectacle of the human mind breaking its an- 
cient bonds, questioning all things and overleaping all 
barriers, the human soul reaching out to others and 
discovering kinship, the human spirit with new vision 
and new power breaking the chains of ignorance, 
destroying the dividing walls of class and prejudice, 
holding up the ideal of liberty, equality and brother- 
hood, seeing new meaning in the command Be ye there- 
fore perfect. At the close of the most terrible war 
recorded in human annals, with a great part of the 
world writhing in still unrelieved agony, we can yet 
feel that Armageddon was the tempestuous announce- 
ment of the adolescence, let us say, of a new age, whose 
birth was proclaimed with the Social Contract and the 
French Revolution. It was the conflict of forces that 
have been taking shape for a hundred years and more. 
And it had hardly begun when dreams and aspirations 
once vague and clouded — revealed only to the few — 
became clearer and more insistent for realization. 

On the surface and in its inception the issues of the 
war were political — the ambitions of a state intoxi- 
cated with power, the rivalry of Pan-germanism and 



EUROPE S UNSETTLED QUESTIONS 1 5 

Pan-slavism, the conflict of democracy with auto- 
cratic or aristocratic militarism. And these issues 
were great and fateful, not in any sense to be ignored. 
Yet before the German armies had been in Belgium a 
day, certainly long before Verdun or the Somme, we 
were aware that there were moral and spiritual issues 
vastly greater than any question of control of the 
Balkans, the possession of Alsace-Lorraine, or even 
popular versus autocratic government. And as the 
struggle went on the directly political issues, important 
as they were, appeared relatively less and less so. 
Even the Revolution in Russia, apparently a purely po- 
litical phenomenon, soon turned out to be political 
mainly in a negative sense. For it was not construc- 
tive in the ordinary sense at all; it was an upheaval 
of moral and spiritual forces that were sweeping aside 
an outworn form. The original causes of the war 
were almost forgotten as the new issues leaped into 
view, dazzling and bewildering, new and yet not new, 
familiar and yet smiting us with the shock of sudden 
and vivid comprehension. Even the dramatic collapse 
of the two Central Empires stirred our imagination but 
sluggishly, so convinced were we that Hohenzollerns 
and Hapsburgs had been stage heroes, dressed in trum- 
pery and out-of-date splendor — that the life and spirit 
of their drama had vanished before the fall of the cur- 



1 6 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

tain, the last scenes played before a cold and disil- 
lusioned audience. 

Part of our task then will be to trace the source 
of Europe's troubles in the thwarted development of 
nationality and democracy, in the mixture of good and 
evil in expansion, in the class conflicts and social up- 
heavals that have come from the working out of the 
industrial revolution. But we must never lose sight of 
the fact that these do not cover the whole field. Be- 
hind them, driving them and often molding them, is 
the less concrete but none the less dynamic movement 
toward Spiritual emancipation. 



II 

Revolution and Readjustment in France 

The French Revolution began, our historians tell us, 
with the meeting of the States General x in May, 1789, 
or with the storming of the Bastille by the Paris mob 
in the following July, or with the abolition of feudal 
privileges in August. And it is commonly considered 
to have closed with the beginning of Napoleon's mas- 
tery in 1799 or perhaps with the final collapse of his 
power in 181 5. These dates have the advantage of 
definiteness and convenience. But we must not let 
them obscure the real facts. Dates are landmarks, 
quite indispensable for clear historical thinking; but 
when we use them to mark off periods they are never 
more than approximate, and to allow them to dominate 
our minds is much worse than to ignore them entirely. 
The events of 1789 were of great importance and are 

1 States General is the name given to the body which was the 
French equivalent of the English Parliament. It represented 
three classes or estates — the first estate, the clergy, the second, 
the nobles, and the third, the Commons or towns-people. The 
States General met first in 1302, seven years after the birth of 
the English Parliament in 1295. But it had a less happy history, 
and its last meeting before 1789 was in 1614. From 1614 to 1789 
the king was an autocrat. 

17 



1 8 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

worth remembering with all possible exactness. They 
represent the visible end of the old Bourbon regime. 
But in its real significance to France and to Europe the 
Revolution is as difficult to date exactly as, say, the 
Renaissance, or what we call the Middle Ages, or the 
Reformation. It began long before 1789 and ended 
< — it may be — about a century later. Indeed some 
have suggested not inaptly that it ended with the Marne 
and Verdun. And we shall even see reasons for be- 
lieving that it is still in process, that France's problem 
of reconstruction is really best understood as a phase 
of the Revolution. For the Revolution represented 
not merely a political change from absolutism to de- 
mocracy but a changed way of looking at life, a social 
and spiritual movement, vague perhaps as to exact 
dates but by no means vague in its essential character 
or in its results. 

The fact remains that conventional dates have their 
value in giving us a kind of skeletal structure, and 
there are a few that we shall assume in our discussion. 
Let us fix in our minds the publication of Rousseau's 
Social Contract in 1761 and his Emile in 1762, the 
meeting of the States General in 1789, the proclama- 
tion of the first French Republic in 1792, the attain- 
ment of supreme power by Napoleon Bonaparte in 
1 799- 1 804, his fall and the restoration of the Bour- 
bons in 181 5, the expulsion of Charles X and the ex- 



REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 1 9 

periment of an elective king, Louis Philippe, in 1830, 
his removal and the proclamation of the Second Re- 
public in 1848, the Second Empire — that of Na- 
poleon III — from 1852 and 1870, and the beginning 
of the Third Republic in September, 1870, after the 
defeat at Sedan. Beneath the surface, beneath these 
securely dated political facts and giving them meaning, 
was the spirit of the Revolution, the spirit that moved 
France from the mid-eighteenth century to the present 
day. It is only by understanding this spirit, the mo- 
tive force that gave the Revolution its power to 
destroy and rebuild, that we can see the meaning and 
drift of the gropings, the discouragements, the mighty 
enthusiasms, the failures and the successes of a great 
people in a great era. 

What then was in the minds of the representatives 
of the French towns as they took their seats in the 
great hall at Versailles on the fifth of May, 1789? 
What questions and what ideals were stirring them, 
what education had equipped them for the task that lay 
before them, what leaders and forces had molded 
them? Only in small degree can we answer this, but 
we can very easily see the essential facts that they faced 
and the most controlling ideals that ruled them. The 
most obvious of the facts was the appalling political 
crisis that had caused the government, sorely against 
its wish, to call them together ; the most obvious of the 



20 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

ideals was that voiced by Jean Jacques Rousseau ; and 
the minds of the Deputies, as of most thinking French- 
men, moved along channels largely made for them by 
Montesquieu, the Encyclopaedists and Voltaire. 

Every member of the States General knew that the 
actual government of France was a ghastly failure. 
They knew that the previous century had seen the de- 
velopment of an absolute monarchy which had at least 
had the merit of brilliant success. Under Henry IV, 
under the ministers of Louis XIII — Richelieu and 
Mazarin — and under Louis XIV and his advisers, 
notably Jean Baptiste Colbert, France had become the 
first state of Europe, first in military power, in indus- 
try, in commerce, in literature, and in military and aes- 
thetic leadership. Freedom was indeed sadly cur- 
tailed, and there were many abuses. But if France was 
governed by an autocracy it was at least an efficient 
one, and if the merchants, the craftsmen, the profes- 
sional men, even the land-holding aristocrats, were al- 
lowed no share in legislation or administration they 
at least waxed prosperous and grew in mental keenness, 
in breadth of vision, in spiritual courage and initiative. 
Then came the later days of Louis XIV, when the 
giants were dead and when defeat and disaster hum- 
bled the pride of France. Then came year after year 
of futile government when a people intelligent and 
quick beyond most others, a people trained to know 



REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 21 

efficient leadership when they saw it, learned to de- 
spise their rulers and to chafe at neglected abuses. 
When at last national bankruptcy threatened, and the 
government of Louis XVI was forced to summon 
the States General, every man who came to Versailles 
knew the record, knew the story of the great days of 
Henry IV, Richelieu and Colbert, of the evil days of 
Louis XV and Louis XVI. The monarchy was 
weighed in the balance and found wanting. The glit- 
ter of the court of Louis XIV had concealed the false 
principles on which it was based. Now the glitter was 
gone, and the rotten foundations stood out in melan- 
choly clearness. 1 

Moreover, they all knew that while the political ma- 
chinery had been groaning and creaking toward dismal 
collapse the people, powerless in government, had 
shown no signs of decadence or apathy. Keen think- 
ers and prophetic geniuses had entered eagerly on the 
inquiry into natural laws, the basis of government, the 
principles of economics, the foundations of religion, 
all the phenomena of nature and society. Everywhere 

1 The student who wishes to have a brief first-hand statement 
of the abuses and tyrannies that were to be swept away in the 
Revolution may find it in the Protest of the Cour des Aides pre- 
sented to the king in 1775, fourteen years before the meeting of 
the States General. It is published in English in the University 
of Pennsylvania Translations and Reprints (Longmans, Green 
and Company). 



22 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

men were investigating and discussing the reason of 
things. Every thinking man in France knew of the 
work of Diderot and his companions of the Encyclo- 
paedia. Every man who could read, i. e., the great mass 
of those who guided public opinion in the towns, had 
read the tracts of Voltaire, the Social Contract and the 
Entile of Rousseau. Every man who stood in out- 
ward deference before the king in May, 1789, had 
learned to ask the question "why?", had laughed, 
albeit grimly, at the literary cartoons of the great 
mocker, and had meditated wistfully on the potent 
dreams of a " return to nature." 

Voltaire (1694-1778) was the first literary figure of 
his age. And he was far from being merely a high 
priest of the learned and cultivated classes. His biting 
humor, his penetrating and cutting criticisms, his in- 
discriminate attacks on church, government, and con- 
ventions of all kinds, his wit and his incomparable 
lucidity, gave him fame and a power to which there is 
no modern parallel. The general tendency of Euro- 
pean thought in his day was toward what has been 
called rationalism, the fearless application of human 
reason to all fields of thought and belief. Religious 
skepticism was a fashion among polite circles in 
France as it was in England and Germany. But Vol- 
taire made rationalism and skepticism popular, and his 
pen threatened to destroy whatever it touched. Often 



REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 23 

he was unfair. Often he was superficial. But he 
was never dull and he was always destructive. Yet he 
was neither a democrat nor an atheist. He despised 
the dreams and the inarticulate aspirations of the peo- 
ple as much as he despised royalty and aristocracy. 
He built a church ("Erected to God by Voltaire") 
and avowed that without belief in God morality and 
society itself would perish. One of his most char- 
acteristic and famous aphorisms was that if there 
were no God it would be necessary to invent Him. He 
attacked the State because it was futile, tyrannical and 
inefficient, not because he wished the rule of a democ- 
racy. And he attacked the Church because it was irre- 
ligious, artificial and immoral, because in the name of 
truth it tried to chain men's souls with superstition and 
dogmatism, not because he was an enemy of religion. 
But whatever were his personal beliefs his influence 
was purely destructive. Wherever his writings were 
read the monarchy and the church were stripped of 
their sacredness and held up to ridicule. 

Rousseau (1712-1778) was of another type. If he 
helped to destroy the institutions and ideas of his time 
it was only as one destroys darkness by lighting a 
lamp. He was the apostle of a new idea, the idea of a 
return to nature. Voltaire had attacked the existing 
government as a modern cartoonist does, by criticizing 
and ridiculing specific acts and methods of tyranny and 



24 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

abuse. Rousseau concerned himself not at all with de- 
tails, but struck at the root of the whole system by de- 
claring that men were by nature free. " Man was 
born free, and he is everywhere in chains," is the 
first sentence of the Social Contract. Long ago, he 
said, men were absolutely free ; there was no law ; each 
did what was right in his own eyes. But they tired of 
this life of confusion and conflict and agreed to form 
a society. They devised different forms of govern- 
ment, giving up for the moment their right to do as 
they pleased for the sake of the benefits of coopera- 
tion and peace. So far this was good. But the gov- 
ernments managed to make the people forget their an- 
cient liberty, and the people — not realizing that their 
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness was 
inalienable — became slaves. All because they had 
forgotten that the powers of the government were 
based on a social contract and on nothing else. If one 
party to a contract breaks it the contract becomes void. 
" You are in chains," cried Rousseau. " But the 
chains are of your own making; your liberty is inalien- 
able; your rulers rule only because your fathers dele- 
gated the right to sovereignty, and if they abuse their 
delegated power they cease to deserve it. Reclaim 
your liberty! Your chains are chains of straw, and if 
you will they will vanish at a breath." 

Not that Rousseau wished to return to the anarchi- 



REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 25 

cal state of nature. Like the English thinkers, John 
Locke and Thomas Hobbes, he simply used the familiar 
" state of nature " hypothesis as an historical starting- 
point, a false one as far as historical accuracy was con- 
cerned, but convenient for purposes of argument. He 
had no quarrel with the social contract by which he as- 
sumes men to have escaped from anarchy. But he 
asserted that the purpose of the contract had not been 
attained because the general will of the people had been 
supplanted by an artificial and unjustified rule of the 
few. Society must go through a regeneration in order 
to realize the purpose for which it came into being. 
The problem was first to break the meaningless and 
baseless tyranny of the existing State, and then " to 
find a form of association which shall defend and pro- 
tect, with the entire common force, the person and the 
goods of each associate, and by which, each uniting 
himself to all, may nevertheless obey only himself, and 
remain as free as before." 1 So that he was not in 
any sense an anarchist ; nor was he in the present sense 
of the term a socialist ; he was rather stating the prob- 
lem and ideal of popular sovereignty. 

Rousseau's details of application were of little or no 

value. The magic of his gospel was in his statement 

of an ideal of ordered liberty. And he carefully 

guarded himself against the charge of lawlessness. 

1 Social Contract, bk. I, ch. 6. 



26 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

Law is to him as fundamental as liberty; both are 
" natural " and neither is complete unless it is corre- 
lated with the other. Indeed through law liberty itself 
must be made compulsory. Thus he asserted a para- 
dox which puts in a nutshell one of the most vital 
problems of the present hour. " In order that the 
social pact may not be a vain formula, it tacitly in- 
cludes the covenant, which alone can confer binding 
force on the others, that whoever shall refuse to obey 
the general will shall be constrained to do so by the 
whole body, which means nothing else than that he 
will be forced to be free." x It is a dictum that might 
have been aptly used as a preamble to the constitution 
of the League of Nations. 

As man is born free so he is born good. And just 
as he is everywhere in chains so he is everywhere bru- 
talized by the warping and smothering network of con- 
vention that we call civilization. The program of po- 
litical emancipation was set forth in the Social Con- 
tract, the program of intellectual and spiritual emanci- 
pation in the Emile. The book is the imaginary biog- 
raphy of a boy educated in a natural way. Instead of 
being repressed, molded, fed with information that he 
loathed, drilled in habits that had no meaning, trained 
not to be a man but to be a doll destined to play with 

1 See the whole discussion of this in the Social Contract, bk. 
I, chs. 7 and 8. 



REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 2J 

other dolls in an artificial world, Emile is tended as a 
precious plant is tended by a skilled gardener. To cul- 
tivate a perfect rose one does not try to add to it the 
qualities of a tulip or a lily, nor does one use the brush 
to give a better color. What is needed is adequate soil, 
water and sunlight, protection against enemies and ac- 
cidents, such additional nutriment about the roots as a 
healthy rose craves, and nature will do the rest. The 
seed is as God made it. The environment that will 
give the best growth is to be dictated not by the gar- 
dener but by the needs of the plant. His office is to 
search for laws over which he has no control, which he 
may not defy or neglect without harm, and which it is 
his sole business to ascertain and obey. Absolutely 
the same principle is observed with Emile. If in the 
course of his growth the boy should demand Latin, 
Greek or Mathematics to satisfy his curiosity then 
Latin, Greek or Mathematics become living and needed 
things to him, but not otherwise should he be required 
to learn them. Let him grow in his own way. Give 
him food, air, and sunlight; allow him the full and 
free exercise of his normal activities; protect him 
against danger; let his growth be the progressive sat- 
isfaction of his own craving; and if the result should 
make him unfit for membership in society so much the 
worse for society. If Emile does not become an ac- 
complished Parisian then change Paris; do not force 



28 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

a child of God to become an artificial manikin. 
These then were the things that were uppermost in 
the minds of the men who began and carried through 
the demolition and attempted rebuilding of the French 
state in and after 1789 — on the one hand the futility 
and evils of the traditional system of government, on 
the other hand the growing spirit of scientific inves- 
tigation, the impatient ridicule of shams and outworn 
conventions, the gospel of nature. Now what was 
the outcome? The idealists of 1789-1793 dreamed of 
a golden age; the great sweeping of old abuses into a 
scrap heap by the successive assemblies of those years 
was to be the prelude to a glorious and permanent re- 
construction. But the hope faded as the years went 
by, bringing reforms, victories, the re-vitalizing of na- 
tional life and great glory — but no golden age. Na- 
poleon appeared, was acclaimed as leader, and fell be- 
fore the armies of Europe after exhausting France in 
fruitless wars. The Bourbon kings were restored — 
with a constitution, it is true, and a representative as- 
sembly — but were discarded again in 1830 to make 
way for a " citizen king," Louis Philippe. The ex- 
periment of an elective monarchy was a mere make- 
shift and it lasted a short eighteen years; the republic 
of 1848, the next experiment, found no leaders, was 
torn by party conflicts, and died with small protest or 



REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 29 

mourning when Louis Napoleon consummated the 
coup d'etat that made him Emperor; and when the Em- 
pire fell before the Prussians in 1870 France turned 
to a republic again with little enthusiasm, little con- 
viction that she had yet found the road to liberty, 
equality and fraternity — the road seen with such ra- 
diant clearness in 1789 and lost so soon. 

The political history of modern France is then a 
melancholy story — a story, on the surface, of failure 
and disillusionment and little else. And yet it is not 
without inspiration. For it is the story of a failure 
far from ignoble, of a people who had seen a glorious 
vision and were content with no compromise. They 
accepted this or that temporary solution to their prob- 
lem — Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Louis Philippe, Na- 
poleon III, this or some other republican form — only 
because human strength becomes exhausted, because 
weariness and discouragement made necessary a pause 
in the climbing, because under stress of effort and 
bewilderment ideals grow clouded and the crying need 
is for rest and peace. But that which unsympathetic 
onlookers called the revolutionary fever, the burning 
desire for perfection, aroused the French people again 
and again to new effort. Until of recent years they 
have come to see that salvation is not through consti- 
tutions, and that the road to perfection may be found 



30 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

by a way other than the constant destruction and 
anxious rebuilding of governmental forms. 

Now let us approach the matter from another angle. 
We have been considering the spirit and aims of the 
Revolution, and have seen the failure of France to 
carry out the high program of 1789. The reaction of 
181 5, the upheavals of 1830 and 1848, the restoration 
of the Empire in 1852 all seem singularly futile, bar- 
ren of actual result, no matter how clearly they may 
illustrate the persistence of the revolutionary spirit. 
The creation of the Third Republic was not futile, but 
in some respects it was more discouraging than the 
failure of 1848, for it was based on compromise; the 
republic stood not because it satisfied France but be- 
cause nothing better seemed to be available. 

All this is true, but it is not the whole truth. The 
Revolution failed to realize its dream, but it did not 
wholly fail. Indeed the use of the word dream is a 
little deceptive in that it implies an ideal based on no 
thought of practical problems and of past experience. 
As a matter of fact revolution and reconstruction went 
hand in hand from the beginning, were indeed differ- 
ent aspects of the same thing. And the men of 1789 
— idealists though they might be — were by no means 
blind visionaries. 

Revolution, to us, has perhaps too overwhelming an 
association. We think of it as the casting of old things 



REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 3 1 

overboard, the turning of a fresh page, the wiping of 
the slate, the setting forth on an unknown sea, the 
breaking of a shell which lies thereafter shattered and 
discarded by the new life that issues forth. All of 
these metaphors are used so easily that to some extent 
they control our thinking. But as a matter of fact a 
political revolution is seldom a complete overthrow and 
a completely new start. Its analogy in the life of an 
individual is perhaps what evangelical Christians call 
" conversion " — a change undeniably of high and far- 
reaching consequence, but a change which leaves in- 
tact one's tastes, one's intellectual gifts and equipment, 
one's temperament, many of one's habits. It gives all 
of them a new meaning and a new direction, no doubt, 
but it does not blot them out. Similarly when we 
approach the France of 1815 or even more the France 
of 1870 we must not exaggerate the effects of the whirl- 
wind that had swept her political world, the rapid 
changes that made her seem to her more sluggish or 
cautious neighbors a very symbol and type of political 
instability. The truth was that in 1870 as in 181 5 the 
changes wrought were less impressive than the solidity 
of that which remained standing after the storm. 

For the old system was far from completely de- 
stroyed in 1789, and much of the reconstructive work 
undertaken at each phase of the revolution remained 
untouched during the political changes that followed. 



32 RECONSTRUCTION" AND NATIONAL LIFE 

So that in considering even the political side of modern 
France we must not think of an edifice wrecked again 
and again to be painfully built again after each con- 
vulsion — the present one dating from 1870. The 
form seen by the world was broken, indeed; but the 
reality was left largely intact. If we keep our archi- 
tectural figure of speech we might even think of Di- 
rectors, Consuls, Emperors, Kings and Presidents as 
successive decorative appendages, not as integral parts 
of the structures of which they were the most visible 
features. Such a conception would not be quite accu- 
rate, indeed, but it would be much safer than to fix our 
attention solely on names, titles and political forms. 

Thus it would be true, for instance, to say that in the 
matter of government the French Revolution did not 
achieve complete liberty but did achieve centralization, 
i. e., it perfected the very form that Richelieu and Col- 
bert had tried to attain in the seventeenth century. 
The ministers of Louis XIII and Louis XIV had done 
much in this direction; but they had been hampered 
by privileges and barriers bequeathed from past ages, 
obstacles too firmly established to be removed. In 
one night, the night. of August 4, 1789, many of these 
crumbled to dust. The plan of Richelieu was carried 
out by the Revolution. The practical French instinct 
for orderly arrangement triumphed while the more 
difficult ideal of equality remained an unrealized hope. 



REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 33 

And Napoleon completed what the National Assembly- 
began, until the administrative system was created that 
flourishes to this day — a division of France into de- 
partments, each presided over by a prefect appointed 
by and responsible to the central government. Nearly 
all the actual administrative system of France is as 
Napoleon shaped it; he only reduced to order and 
consistency the work which the revolutionary assem- 
blies had begun ; and the revolutionary assemblies them- 
selves followed precedents and used customs and ideas 
that belonged to the old regime. 

The essential point is that neither an individual nor a 
nation can change habits, equipment, temperament and 
ways of thinking in the twinkling of an eye. We must 
think of the Revolution not primarily as a storm that 
swept everything away but as a change in political and 
social perspective, a change that had been working be- 
neath the political surface before 1789 and that in and 
after that year began to effect a re-arrangement of po- 
litical and social ideas and forms in accordance with 
an altered conception of political and social aims. The 
change was in many ways slow, in a few ways very 
rapid. Some things, like the abolition of feudal privi- 
leges and the introduction of some measure of na- 
tional participation in government, were done at once. 
No delay was needed in the removal of the more ob- 
vious abuses, the more irritating and oppressive handi- 



34 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

caps. But the full working out of the idea of liberty 
and the devising of institutions that would represent 
a satisfactory adjustment of liberty and equality to the 
ideals of France — this was slow, a matter of educa- 
tion and experiment. 

For it must be remembered that the Revolution was 
the work largely of one class, the bourgeois, that only a 
small minority of the French people had any consider- 
able hand in any of the political changes from 1789 to 
1870, that most of the agricultural population and 
many of even the townspeople remained stubbornly 
conservative throughout, little interested in the ques- 
tion whether an emperor, a king or a president held 
sway at Paris provided they were left in peace to live 
their own lives. The awakening of a whole people to 
a new idea is bound to be slow and subject to lapses. 
And human nature is too complex for any one formula 
to cover its needs — even the intoxicating cry of 
" liberty, equality and brotherhood." 

So that we may view the political changes of the 
nineteenth century not as failures so much as exper- 
iments, and progressive experiments. And we must 
remember that all the glamor of the word " liberty " 
did not conceal from Frenchmen the fact that govern- 
ment is a practical affair in which caution is a virtue, 
machinery necessary, experience not to be despised, 
and efficiency by no means to be sacrificed. A con- 



REVOLUTION AND READJUSTMENT 35 

stitution might be found unsatisfactory and might be 
displaced, but a practical and beneficent reform was 
to be retained, certainly. Failure to discover the ideal 
form of government might be discouraging, and might 
have an unfortunate effect on the body politic, but in 
the meantime every experiment had its value and ex- 
perience was teaching its lesson. In other words the 
failure was external and superficial, due mainly to the 
essential difficulty of the problem, to passionate in- 
tensity of partisanship, and to lack of leadership — 
for though the nineteenth century produced many great 
Frenchmen there was not in the list a single statesman 
of the first rank. But it was failure that was perfectly 
consistent with definite and steady progress in the 
fundamentals of government — law, order, and equal 
justice — and with brilliant achievements in every 
other field of national life. 

What France needed above all things at the opening 
of the twentieth century was courage, self-confidence, 
realization that the form mattered less than the reality. 
And the Marne, Verdun, the restoration of Alsace- 
Lorraine have perhaps given her the one thing neces- 
sary. We may yet see the long and valiant progress 
in reconstruction end in triumph, the principles of the 
Revolution adjusted to the spirit and genius of France. 
For she has never lost sight of the goal ; she has never 
given up her strong and patient search for the road; 



$6 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

she has never relapsed into apathy, however weary and 
discouraged she might be; and the wiping out of the 
disaster of 1870 has given her a new and splendid 
courage. 



Ill 

The French Revolution and National Life 

We shall try now to see the working out, the ad- 
justment, the modification, the progressive understand- 
ing of the principles of the Revolution not in political 
changes, not in constitutional experiments, but in 
things that expressed and affected the French people 
in their ways of looking at life. They found it diffi- 
cult to work out a political creed beyond its funda- 
mental propositions of liberty and equality, even more 
difficult to work out a form that would express even 
such articles of the creed as they did see and accept. 
But they could and did set about the task of educa- 
tion, and they could apply their energies to the fields of 
art, literature and social betterment. In these we may 
see the national genius seizing on all the fundamental 
principles of the Revolution — liberty, sincerity, the 
return to nature — and still remaining essentially 
French, with the French passion for lucidity, magnifi- 
cence and idealism. Sometimes these seem to clash, 
— lucidity with libeity, magnificence with sincerity 
and simplicity, idealism with naturalism. But the 
conflict was not irreconcilable, and the study of 

37 



38 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

some of its phases may help us to understand 
the education of the French people for their new- 
era, the basis of their problem of reconstruction. 
We shall discuss here only three lines of development 
— education, because it is fundamental, painting, be- 
cause it throws light on some of the most interesting 
sides of the new French spirit, and the entry of the 
workingmen into politics because it is a peculiarly 
vital element in present-day France. 

1. Thirty years before the Revolution Diderot had 
mapped out a plan of national education, a scheme of 
the centralized, clearly apprehended sort dear to the 
French mind, by which the University at Paris should 
be the top of a pyramid and a universal system of 
schools its base. This remained a suggestion until the 
end of the old regime. But among the projects laid 
before the representatives of France in the early nine- 
ties were several proposals for a national system of ed- 
ucation along the lines indicated by Diderot. And 
while it was easier in those agitated years to pass res- 
olutions than to undertake the immense task of bring- 
ing into being a great body of schools demanding 
skilled teachers, careful supervision, and the consider- 
ation of innumerable details of administration and 
method, yet the new spirit was clearly manifest. 
Leaders of all parties agreed that a free state must rest 
on intelligent citizenship, and Danton even advocated 



FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 39 

the taking over of all children from the uneven and 
often unintelligent control of their parents to be edu- 
cated by the nation at the nation's expense. 

Moreover a change took place in the whole concep- 
tion of the content and purpose of education. The 
schools of pre-revolutionary France were classical 
schools for the training of scholars, professional men 
and gentlemen. Their curriculum ignored the " practi- 
cal " studies that might contribute to the life of the or- 
dinary citizen. For ages the religious ideal had dom- 
inated the schools of the Christian world, until the 
Renaissance added to the religious ideal that of liter- 
ary appreciation and classical scholarship. The scien- 
tific renaissance of the seventeenth century had begun 
an active movement for the introduction of science to 
the curriculum; but the effect of the scientific impulse 
had been slight up to 1789, and the actual schools 
of the eighteenth century were schools of polite learn- 
ing — and polite religion — for the upper classes. 
With the Revolution came a new ideal and the begin- 
ning of a revision in curriculum and method which 
have persisted and developed to the present day. 1 

1 We use the word " beginning " with the usual reservations. It 
is the common and not uninstructive experience of the historical 
student to find that a movement that "began" at some stated 
time had really been going on for generations or centuries. The 
point of this word of caution here may be seen by any one who 
cares to look into the educational ideas of, say, Rabelais and 
Comenius. 



40 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

The ideal was intelligent citizenship, " social effi- 
ciency " ; the revision of the curriculum was in the 
direction of subordinating the classics to history, ge- 
ography, natural science and the modern languages 
and literature; the change of method was along the line 
suggested by the Emile and developed by the Swiss 
teacher Pestalozzi. 

The whole educational change was so profound, de- 
manded the study and digestion of so complex a mass 
of details, that it was bound to be slow. The the- 
orists of the eighteenth century saw the general idea 
quite clearly, but we can concede the merits of their 
program without blaming them for failing to realize 
it. No matter how just a plan or how true a theory 
there are always innumerable obstacles to a great edu- 
cational reform in prejudices to be conciliated, tradi- 
tions to be conquered, machinery to be devised, de- 
tailed plans to be worked out. The essential point is 
that the need for public education was seen and faced, 
an integral element in the hopes and plans of the new 
France. It was given a preliminary form by Napo- 
leon's creation of the University of France, a system 
of national education controlled from top to bottom 
by the head of the University in Paris; it was limited 
in scope by the Emperor's desire to check the immense 
popular forces that had given him his power and 
might menace it in future, and it suffered from the re- 



FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 4 1 

action and the exhaustion of France's vitality after 
1815; but it revived with the expulsion of Charles 
X and the comparative liberalism of the thirties, and 
has moved steadily ahead ever since. 

Education in France has lacked the brilliant reform- 
ers whose genius gave peculiar interest to the educa- 
tional movement in Germany. But it has suffered less 
from the domination of a narrow and stifling if unde- 
niably efficient control, for while the French school 
system is absolutely centralized, supervised by the gov- 
ernment as completely as in Germany, yet France was 
never Prussia. Political influence has often worked 
harm. But on the whole the program of the Revolu- 
tion has been nobly carried through. In 1789 fifty per 
cent, of the men in France and seventy-five per cent, of 
the women could not sign their names. By 1870 the 
percentage of illiteracy was reduced to twenty-five for 
men and thirty-seven for women. By 1898 it was cut 
down to five and seven, respectively. And by the 
opening of the war illiteracy had almost disappeared. 1 
It is impossible to measure the significance of such a 
progress. For the future of France it means incom- 
parably more than the achievements of a few brilliant 
leaders. 

1 For reference see Monroe, Text-book in the History of Edu- 
cation (Macmillan), and Farrington, French Secondary Schools 
(Longmans), and The Public Primary School System of France 
(Teachers' College, Columbia University, 1906). 



42 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

2. The student who wishes to see at a glance the 
historical and human interest of painting should place 
side by side any characteristic work of Watteau, 
Greuze, Millet and — say — Cezanne. Let us elim- 
inate the question of like or dislike and quite ignore the 
point of view of the " art critic." Let us simply re- 
member that every painter, willingly or unwillingly, 
consciously or unconsciously, reflects the tastes and in- 
terests of the people for whom he paints, the environ- 
ment which has molded his own attitude to life. 

Watteau's picture stands for a single class — the 
pleasure-loving, irresponsible aristocracy of the old 
regime. It fits harmoniously into a Luxembourg 
drawing room of Louis XV. It is dainty, gay, full 
of the spirit that we associate with the ball room and 
the banquet hall. Its world is not a fairy world — 
avowedly remote from all that is visible and prosaic but 
perfectly real to the imagination of every one, king or 
peasant, who has ever been a normal child ; it is not the 
world of the ordinary man, the world of nature and 
of daily life; it is not even the world of great deeds, of 
heroic or inspiring moments, or the world of allegory, 
or the world of religion, with their wide appeal to dra- 
matic, ethical or spiritual instincts. It is a world beau- 
tiful in its own way but essentially artificial and nar- 
row, a hot-house flowering, foredoomed to perish. 

In the midst of this society of gaiety and careless- 



FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 43 

ness arose a new fashion in the later days of Louis 
XV — the fashion that we associate with the name of 
Rousseau. The world was soon to know the tremen- 
dous potency of the gospel of nature. But while it 
spread like a flame among the middle and lower classes 
it was welcomed as a new plaything by the aristocracy. 
There is a strange pathos in the little hamlet built in 
the park at Versailles, with cottages like the cottages 
of the peasants, where Marie Antoinette and her 
court ladies played at the simple and rural life. It 
was as unreal as the shepherdesses and swains of paint- 
ing and poetry. But it had its beauty even if its tragic 
side was stilt unsuspected. And it is this cult of sim- 
plicity and pseudo-naturalism that one sees in the pic- 
tures of Greuze. They are neither real nor unreal. 
They have the beauty and the truth of the light that 
heralds a devastating forest fire. 

Millet and his contemporaries came after the fire 
had roared by. They were of a new world, and it was 
for the new world that they painted, a world that was 
still struggling to find its way among the relics and 
debris of the conflagration. Rousseau's message had 
been purged of much of its fantastic and unreal element 
and had passed into a world-wide feeling for the eter- 
nal wisdom and beauty of nature, a world-wide inter- 
est in the " common man " whose life was based on 
solid things. It is this that is voiced by Millet. The 



44 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

delight in nature's reality and peace is just as distinc- 
tive of the new era as political and social democracy, 
and we may find it variously expressed not only in 
Millet but in Corot, in Troyon, in Diaz and in Theo- 
dore Rousseau. All of these are deeply significant, 
and it is difficult to speak of them with moderation, so 
truly and nobly do they interpret some of the finest 
and most fruitful visions and convictions of the new 
France. 

Finally there is Cezanne. He is, we admit, an ex- 
treme case. Moreover, to appreciate his work we 
should study it in relation to the whole development 
of modern French art. But this is not a history of 
French painting, and we wish to glance at a picture 
of Cezanne's only to see in it an expression of present- 
day France. We might just as well take a picture by 
Manet, by Matisse, or by a dozen others. All illustrate 
at once a passion for truth and insistence on the right 
of the individual to interpret truth in his own way. 
Truth and beauty are seen not as abstract and as uni- 
versal ideas but as individual reactions, each man his 
own measure of what is true and what is beautiful. 
There is something defiant and challenging about re- 
cent French painting. It has deserted many of the old 
standards, and in doing so it has deserted, it seems to 
many of us, some of the things best worth while in art. 
" You do not like," the artist says to us, " the subject 



FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 45 

I have chosen. Very well — I do. You do not think 
I have painted things as you see them. No, but I 
have painted things as I see them, which is all a 
painter ought to do if he is to be genuine." 

It has often been a matter of comment that the po- 
litical, social and intellectual revolutionary era of the 
close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the 
nineteenth was not accompanied by a revolution in 
painting. The painters of that time were severely 
classic, willing to portray subjects of contemporary in- 
terest but with no changed conception of their art. 
But the revolution has come in our own day, and it is 
not easy yet to see signs of reconstruction. It is vig- 
orously individual, painstaking, intent on scientific ex- 
actness, full of power, recklessly regardless of conven- 
tion, the expression of men almost furiously alive, with 
eyes to the future and backs to the past. To the or- 
dinary onlooker modern French art is a chaos of unin- 
teresting, transient, experimental efforts to portray 
commonplace things with a minimum of inspiration — 
a chaos shot by gleams of beauty, indeed, but in the 
main redeemed only by its unmistakable signs of sin- 
cerity and of search. Yet it is part of France, wad- 
ing through swamps and unlovely plains, perhaps, but 
wading with unconquerable belief that the miry road 
leads to heights undreamed of by the older painters. 
It may be so, and we can admire the faith and the en- 



46 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

thusiasm even if we cannot ourselves see the Vision. 

3. We put aside with regret the contribution of lit- 
erature, albeit almost yielding to the temptation to dis- 
cuss the value of, say, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Guy de 
Maupassant, Daudet and Romain Rolland as inter- 
preters of French life and thought. But it is necessary 
to give what space remains to us for the study of 
France to the workingmen, and to one phase of their 
activities — the effort to reconstruct society on a 
sounder economic basis. In other words we have to 
survey, all too briefly, the growth of French socialism 
and of its offshoot or heresy, syndicalism. 

The industrial revolution was late in reaching 
France. The factory system did not assume impor- 
tance until the later years of Louis Philippe, and the 
first clear sign of the entry of the workingman into 
French politics was seen in the revolution of 1848. 
Socialism existed before that year, indeed, but in a wild, 
Utopian, idealistic form. Its most noteworthy apostle 
had been Fourier, and his remedy for social ills was the 
resolving of the state into small communities of the 
kind advocated by Robert Owen in England and tried 
out with little success in two well-known experiments in 
America — at New Harmony, Indiana and Brook 
Farm, Massachusetts. But this gave place in the 
forties to a movement more like the socialism of to-day, 
and its exponent was Louis Blanc. His scheme, in 



FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 47 

brief, was first — in order of time — the creation of an 
absolutely democratic state, and then the ending of cap- 
italistic control of industry by the forming of social 
workshops, wasteful competition and the tyranny of 
a class being abolished by public ownership. As a pro- 
test and as a sign of coming events Louis Blanc's pro- 
posal had interest and value, but it was never given a 
fair trial; the solid opposition of peasants and bour- 
geois alike — i. e., the vast majority of the nation — 
to any radical change was too much for the compara- 
tively feeble force of socialism; the experiment that 
Louis Blanc was permitted to make in the spring of 
1848 was hampered by impossible conditions; it ended 
in a furious battle in the streets of Paris, and the na- 
tion's fear of radicalism had much to do with the end 
of the Second Republic in 1852. 

For a time socialism seemed dead, but in the fifties 
and the sixties it arose again in more menacing form 
under the leadership of two gifted German Jews, Fer- 
dinand Lassalle and Karl Marx. This new socialism 
will be discussed in another chapter, but its essence 
may be stated here in the words of Lassalle. " Divi- 
sion of labor is really common labor, social combina- 
tion for production. This, the real nature of produc- 
tion, needs only to be explicitly recognized. In the 
total production therefore, it is merely requisite to 
abolish individual portions of capital and to conduct 



48 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

the labor of society which is already common, with the 
common capital of society, and to distribute the result 
of production among all who have contributed to it, 
in proportion to their performance." * This is fre- 
quently known as collectivism, but as worked out in 
detail by Karl Marx it is practically what is meant nine 
times out of ten when the word " socialism " is used 
to-day. It spread rapidly from Germany to France as 
to all the industrial countries of the world, and became 
a mighty and increasing force from the time of Marx 
and Lassalle to the present. 

The ideal of socialism had at least an appearance of 
being identical with liberty, equality and fraternity. 
Moreover any practical working out of the idea im- 
plied a highly centralized machinery. Both theory and 
method would seem to be in a peculiar degree consist- 
ent with French traditions, for if liberty and equality 
were the goals of the Revolution centralization of ad- 
ministration was apparently an essential feature of the 
traditional French conception of government. And as 
a matter of fact the socialist party in France when the 
twentieth century opened numbered more adherents, 
relatively to other parties, than in any other country in 
the world except Germany. 

But French socialism was never as solid and homo- 
geneous as that of Germany. For it became increas- 

1 Kirkup, History of Socialism, p. 105'. 



FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 49 

ingly evident as time went on that French radicalism 
was more deep seated than German, even as it was 
probably true that French conservatism was more stub- 
born. And the views of the workingmen of France 
shaded off from orthodox Marxianism to anarchism in 
infinite and complex gradations. The ideal of liberty 
was more powerful than the tradition of centralization, 
and discipline, organization, solidarity appealed less 
to the Gaul than to the German. So that the result 
in recent years has been the recession of social democ- 
racy and the rise of militant trade unionism or syn- 
dicalism. 

Syndicalism is in a sense the offspring of the two 
great opposites — socialism and anarchism. Socialism 
would make the word " people " mean the workers — 
private capital being abolished and " parasites " being 
compelled to work or starve — and would make the 
State the people organized for government. The 
State, i. e., the people, i. e., the workers, is to be all-pow- 
erful, owning the instruments of production, land and 
capital, and controlling all production and distribution. 
The anarchist, on the other hand, would do away with 
the state entirely, for even the socialist government — 
notwithstanding its plausible theory — would lend it- 
self to manipulation by crafty and unprincipled poli- 
ticians. The anarchist ideal is untrammeled liberty, 
and society is to be a matter of free, cooperative as- 



50 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

sociation binding on no one. Anarchism was indeed 
a much more logical deduction from the " liberty, 
equality and fraternity " slogan than socialism. It 
was born in the mind of a Frenchman, Proud'hon, and 
a French rebel against existing conditions was much 
more apt to take to anarchism than to any theory of an 
organic and all-powerful state. But anarchism has 
the disadvantage of being purely negative, lacking any 
clear and constructive goal, basing its hopes for the fu- 
ture on the seductive but unconvincing doctrine that hu- 
man nature is essentially good and wise, that evil 
springs solely from the artificial restraint of govern- 
ment. Anarchism and socialism are agreed, then, in 
condemning private capitalism, the present social sys- 
tem. But in their program beyond that point they are 
at opposite poles. 

Syndicalism represents their happy reconciliation. 
Syndicat is simply the French word for Trade Union, 
and syndicalism as an organized movement appeared 
first when the Confederation Generale du Travail was 
organized in 1895 by a group of unions who saw possi- 
bilities in the idea of a general strike. In 1902 this 
was joined by the bourses du travail, Chambers of 
Labor, workingmen's societies which had been formed 
in Paris and other cities for the discussion of labor 
problems, and which had federated in 1892. The 



FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL LIFE '5 1 

combined organization became a Confederation of in- 
dustrial unions in which the trade or craft unions had 
been merged, i. e., the units of the Confederation were 
not carpenters, masons, locomotive engineers, tailors 
and the like but all engaged in the building trades, all 
in railroading, all in the clothing industry and so on. 
So that if the carpenters went on strike they would 
be joined by their fellows of the various craftsmen 
associated with them in building, and the area of the 
strike would be widened with an immense increase of 
force. With the new weapon of the general strike the 
Confederation adopted the principle of " direct ac- 
tion " : i. e., it disdained politics and relied on labor 
alone. Anything and everything that could weaken 
and discourage the capitalist — including, for instance, 
the famous or infamous method of sabotage, deliber- 
ate injury to the plant — was considered legitimate. 
In the " class war " all was fair. 

The whole movement was given coherence and a cer- 
tain doubtful clearness by Georges Sorel, the Karl 
Marx of Syndicalism. Yet to compare Sorel with the 
apostle of " scientific " socialism is misleading. He 
does not try to enunciate any definite, logical system. 
He believes rather in the value of the " social myth," 
the unproved and perhaps unprovable belief that sweeps 
mankind to the heights by the very vagueness of its 



52 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

grandeur. The myth does not need to be true ; it may 
never be translated into fact ; it does its work if it in- 
spires enthusiasm and above all if it leads to action. 
For action, not logic, scientific accuracy, or intelligence 
is the force that awakens and redeems, and action 
springs not from reason but from an ideal, a myth, 
whose exact truth is an insignificant matter. To the 
ordinary mind this is at first sight discouraging and 
somewhat bewildering, but it has its point and is not 
in itself revolutionary. Sorel's real menace lies in 
his specific gospel. He believes in the regeneration 
of society through the regeneration and omnipotence 
of the working class — the only class — in his view, 
that is worth considering. And this is to be attained 
not through politics, not through democracy, and not 
through state socialism, but through organized labor 
and direct action. The ownership of capital by all 
the workers — the socialist state — is a scientific de- 
lusion; it would mean bureaucracy and corruption. 
Let labor rely on the autonomous development of in- 
dustrial unions ; let the capital required in each indus- 
try be owned and controlled by the workers of that in- 
dustry, those whose interest is directly concerned in 
that field of production. These unions — federated 
by all means but not bound by any hard and fast consti- 
tution or body of law — represent all the government 
that mankind needs. Reform through politics and 



FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 53 

laws is wasted effort; the real issue is the " class war," 
and the real goal is the liberty and supremacy of the 
working class. 1 

This is neither anarchism nor socialism. It par- 
takes of both. But it has the constructive ideal lacked 
by anarchism and the tangible conviction of liberty 
lacked by socialism. And its interest to us for the pur- 
pose of this particular study is not in its validity or its 
falsity but in the fact that it is a great and growing 
power in France and in the additional fact that it is a 
direct challenge to the centralization that is supposed 
to be peculiarly French. The French state has been 
undoubtedly dominated by the centralizing idea. But 
the actual government of France has been slipping 
away from centralization with every decade of the 
Third Republic, and syndicalism strikes at its very 
root. So perhaps France may yet cast aside the 
method beloved of Colbert, adopted by the National 
Assembly and the Convention, perfected by Napoleon 
and retained through the nineteenth century. There 
has been no visible change in the form of the French 
constitution since 1 870-1 875. But every aspect of 
French life has been instinct with revolt during the last 

1 The menace of syndicalism is of course its program of class 
domination. And the rock on which it will split will be the peas- 
antry, the element in the country which the radicals so persist- 
ently ignore. Syndicalism is known best in America through 
the activities of the I. W. W. 



54 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

twenty years and the fiery enthusiasm and strength of 
soul awakened by the war will hardly check the cur- 
rents of radicalism. Whether the syndicalist disin- 
tegration of society will continue and triumph remains 
to be seen. But it is a force to be reckoned with. 

What then is the upshot of even so brief a survey of 
the progress of France since the Revolution? Such 
conclusions as we might reach would be only confirmed 
and illustrated if we were to add to our view the mes- 
sage of literature and philosophy. 1 And these, tenta- 
tively stated, are fourfold: that the notion of France 
as decadent and degenerate is and always was super- 
ficial and quite false, that the story of her political rev- 
olutions since 1815 is singularly inconsequent, throws 
little real light on her national development, that her 
effort to attain a liberty and a social order that would 
make possible the highest degree of sanity, equality of 
opportunity and progress has been vigorous and con- 
tinuous, and finally that this effort is still going on, is 
still incomplete. 

We repeat then that the reconstruction of France 
must mean to us not simply reconstruction after the 
tremendous crisis of the war. The invasion of 19 14 
was a menace to her whole national life, a threatened 

1 It has been well remarked that Sorel's doctrines are closely- 
akin to those of Henri Bergson. See Ramsay Macdonald, Syn- 
dicalism, pp. 18-22, and Lewis, Syndicalism and the General 
Strike, pp. 54-55- 



FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 55 

interruption to her progress toward the national sal- 
vation that she has been working out for five genera- 
tions. As such it had to be met with her full powers 
of resistance, for victory was a matter of life or death. 
But the coming of peace means more than the end of 
a long and anxious strain. It means the picking up of 
the threads of national advance with a deeper earnest- 
ness and a fuller confidence, the fixing of the eye once 
more on the Celestial City that was not forgotten dur- 
ing the fight with Apollyon — whose glory and de- 
sirableness shone indeed and still shines with greater 
splendor because of the battle. In fine, the basis of 
reconstruction is not one of constitutional forms, of 
political ambitions or of rectified frontiers; it is the 
living spirit of France, cautious yet iconoclastic, skep- 
tical yet glowing with faith, proud of her great mem- 
ories yet still striving confidently toward an ideal — the 
realization of liberty, equality and brotherhood. 



IV 

The Basis of Reconstruction in Germany 

At the present moment Germany is probably the 
most interesting spot on the globe to the student of so- 
ciety and nationality, Twenty years ago any of us 
would have said that the German people had found the 
permanent solution of their national problem in the 
Empire. Not that the empire was necessarily to re- 
main autocratic and militaristic, for the Social Democ- 
racy was recognized as a growing force that would 
inevitably cause a modification of the constitution and 
of the general attitude of the Empire both to liberty 
and to world politics; but no one anticipated any 
fundamental change. In essentials, we thought, Ger- 
many had found herself. Yet we have seen the Em- 
pire collapse and the whole form and future of German 
nationality thrown into solution. Only in Russia, 
among all the great peoples of the world, is the prob- 
lem so acute, the issue so uncertain. And nowhere, if 
we wish to follow intelligently the events of the next 
few years, is it so necessary to understand the basis 
of national life on which reconstruction is to stand. 

56 



THE BASIS OF GERMAN NATIONAL LIFE 57 

It has become a commonplace during the war to say 
that Germany meant really two separate things — the 
German people and Prussia. Commonplaces are not 
always true, but in this case the observation was ac- 
curate and even fundamental, true as it was that in the 
war itself the German people and Prussia were one. 
A single illustration will serve. If any intelligent 
person had been asked in, let us say, 1850, to name a 
few representative Germans his list would have in- 
cluded Martin Luther, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Hegel, 
Lessing, Beethoven, Niebuhr, and perhaps a dozen 
others of the same type. Rather less certainly there 
would be three statesmen, the Great Elector, Frederick 
the Great and Stein — two of them Hohenzollerns and 
the third a minister of Prussia; but none of these ex- 
cept Frederick the Great would be as familiar names 
to the world at large as those of the poets and musi- 
cians. If the same question had been asked at any 
time between 1870 and 19 14 the name of Bismarck 
would have leaped out automatically, first on the list, 
overshadowing all the rest. That is to say, the preem- 
inent German achievements before 1850 were in the 
fields of philosophy, literature, music, philology, his- 
tory: since 1870 there have been added the construc- 
tion of a great State and the organization that made 
possible an immense development of industry and com- 
merce. And the nearness of the recent phase, the strik- 



58 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

ing and even spectacular character of German exploits 
since 1866, the fascination both of enormous military 
power and of world-wide economic expansion, have 
distorted our perspective. 

Since August, 19 14, moreover, the giant has become 
an ogre, and for years to come it will be difficult to dis- 
sociate from the German name a cold-blooded inhu- 
manity, destructiveness, arrogance and treachery that 
made a race honored and even loved appear to the 
world as a loathsome plague. Yet the student of so- 
ciety cannot rest content with this. He cannot allow 
the events of less than half a century to obliterate the 
memory of a thousand years. He must keep in mind 
the old Germany as well as the Germany of Bismarck, 
the Germany of Wittemberg and Weimar as well as 
the Germany of Louvain and the Lusitania; he must 
remember that the Empire lasted less than fifty years ; 
and he must face the fact that a sound reconstruction, 
the national redemption of the German people, is a 
matter of enormous consequence to the whole world. 
We cannot ignore the policy of " blood and iron," the 
evil deeds of 19 14-18, but neither can we fix our eyes 
exclusively on one epoch and one phase of that epoch 
without being led to false conclusions. 

We shall try first to see what is meant by the phrase 
" the older Germany." Those who view the older 
Germany as dead will regard its study as more or less 



THE BASIS OF GERMAN NATIONAL LIFE 59 

academic, as part of the history of humanity and there- 
fore having its contribution, but as having no direct 
bearing on the problem of German reconstruction. 
Few students will share such a view. An individual 
may indeed undergo radical transformation in a brief 
period. New temptations or crises may develop hith- 
erto dormant and unsuspected weaknesses and the 
structure of character may collapse as a healthy bodily 
frame may be disintegrated by a deadly disease; new 
light and new inspiration may arouse forces of strength 
and virtue that will bring about regeneration and moral 
upbuilding. But a whole people is not so easily 
changed. Nations do indeed pass through crises, un- 
dergo new experiences, surfer modifications for good 
and evil that often suggest a parallel to the conversion, 
the awakening, the degeneration of an individual. But 
the national mass is so complex that its changes are 
bound to be less radical and less rapid than those of a 
single human being, and the parallel is only suggestive, 
not conclusive. We shall refuse to admit then that 
the Germany of the future is any more apt to resemble 
the Germany of Bismarck than the Germany of Goethe. 
There has been a change, no doubt, but neither the 
splendor nor the blunders and crimes of the last phase 
of German history convince us that continuity was ir- 
reparably broken. The old foundations are still there 
and much of the superstructure may need only repair 



60 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

and alteration, even if a new plan be adopted, some of 
the decoration and walls be torn down, and the archi- 
tects be dismissed. 

Politically, Germany did not exist in the eighteenth 
century at all. It was brought into being by the ham- 
mer strokes of Napoleon. When the States General 
of France met at Versailles in 1789 there were over 
three hundred independent states in what we now call 
Germany, and Austria was as much a German state as 
Bavaria or Saxony. They were held together in 
theory by the shadow of a great name, the Empire, but 
the title of Emperor — held usually, since the thir- 
tenth century, by the head of the House of Hapsburg 
— meant only dignity, a certain splendor hallowed by 
associations, by memories of Frederick Barbarossa, 
Otto the Great, Charlemagne and Augustus, but no 
power. Germany was ruled by its princes — kings, 
dukes, grand dukes, bishops, knights — each absolute 
in his own domain, the only exceptions to this miscel- 
lany of autocracy being the thirty free cities. There 
was no room for national feeling or for patriotism. 
"Of love of country," said Lessing, " I have no con- 
ception. To me it seems at best but an heroic weak- 
ness which I am right glad to be without." 

If any German of that time could have been led to 
speculate on the question of national unity he might 



THE BASIS OF GERMAN NATIONAL LIFE 6 1 

have considered three possibilities — voluntary feder- 
ation, forcible union under the Hapsburgs, forcible 
union under the Hohenzollerns. The first he would 
have dismissed at once as inconceivable. The second 
was conceivable, given a pre-eminent political and mil- 
itary genius, but it would mean another Thirty Years' 
War and would be regarded as a supreme disaster by 
every German outside of Austria. The third was even 
less likely. Prussia, it is true, was not handicapped as 
was Austria by a great non-German population ; apart 
from her Polish subjects she was a German state; 
but in the eighteenth century this was a matter of in- 
difference. Austria's Slavic and Magyar subjects 
formed just as good tax-payers and soldiers as her 
Germans ; all were alike pawns to be played as Vienna 
willed ; and under normally equal leadership Austria's 
power was greater than that of Prussia. Still Fred- 
erick the Great had shown that genius could wipe out 
the difference in man-power and wealth, and Prussia 
was at least a possibility as the mistress of Germany. 
A bare possibility, however; even Frederick had not 
attempted an adventure which would have united 
against him all his neighbors. On the whole, German 
unity was not even a dream, not even desired, not an 
element in practical or even Utopian politics. 

But on the other hand if since there was no German 



62 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

nation 1 there was no room for national patriotism 
there was much room for pride of race. The German 
could look back to at least two eras in which his people 
had figured in the world with honor and power. One 
was the age of the Hanseatic League, when German 
merchants were lords of the Baltic, when they prac- 
tically controlled the trade of northern Europe and ex- 
tended their influence far south to the Mediterranean, 
when the German cities had freed themselves from the 
rule of the princes and had no equals in power and 
wealth outside of Italy. And the other was the age 
of Luther, when the friar of Wittemberg raised his 
banner of revolt against papal domination. The Han- 
seatic League had lost its proud greatness by the end 
of the fifteenth century, and the followers of Luther 
had within two generations forgotten his noble faith 
and thrown away their great opportunity in political 
and sectarian quarrels. But the race that had pro- 
duced the merchant princes of Liibeck and the reform- 
ers of the sixteenth century could surely not thereafter 
remain barren. Nor indeed had it remained barren. 
Mozart and Beethoven were both living in 1789, rep- 
resentatives of a movement deep, broad, and full of 
splendor. We cannot discuss here the contribution of 
music — the one debt of the world to Germany that is 

1 That is, politically ; the expression " German nation " was 
used sometimes in the non-political sense of " German people." 



THE BASIS OF GERMAN NATIONAL LIFE 63 

least disputed. It was another proof of a many-sided 
and fruitful genius. Yet like the greatness of the 
Hansa, like the greatness of Luther and his contem- 
poraries, so the greatness of the masters of music had 
nothing to do with national unity. They were Ger- 
mans, but in a very true sense they were men without a 
country. 

Of all the social movements in Germany before the 
nineteenth century the Reformation is, no doubt, the 
most instructive. As far as German unity was con- 
cerned it had held out the greatest promise and had re- 
sulted in the most discouraging failure. It had ended 
in the shattering disaster of the Thirty Years' War. 
But the calamities of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- 
turies were traceable to a single cause — an utter lack 
of solidarity on the part of the people of which politi- 
cal disunion was only the most visible sign. The very 
definiteness of the evil was a warning that might, if 
the evil were not too deep-seated, lead to a remedy. 
Moreover this lack of solidarity had, one might think, 
a certain element of promise in its resentment of ex- 
ternal control, its vigorous individualism. And there 
was added to this individualism a high moral princi- 
ple to which Luther gave powerful expression and 
which did not die with him — the principle of service 
and duty, long held to be peculiarly German. " A 
Christian man is the freest of all, and subject to none. 



64 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

A Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and 
subject to every one." These are the two propositions 
with which Luther began his essay On the Liberty of a 
Christian Man. This emphasis of individualism and 
of the moral law may seem curious to those who think 
only of the Germany of recent years, but it will seem 
less so after a little reflection, and in any case we are 
dealing at present with the older Germany. The " an- 
cient German freedom " and " German honesty and 
kindliness " were commonplace phrases not so long 
ago, and few observers doubted their essential truth. 
Moreover, Luther expressed in the most funda- 
mental article of his religious revolt, another element 
which was characteristically German and was deeply 
significant for both good and ill. We refer to his re- 
vival and emphasis of the doctrine of justification by 
faith. We must not examine this too closely, nor 
must we insist too absolutely on consistency in ap- 
plication. But the essential principle involved in jus- 
tification by faith is unmistakable. It meant pro- 
test against the doctrine of salvation through 
externals — indulgences, penance, priestly absolu- 
tion, dispensations or anything of the sort — and 
the emphasis of direct communion with God. 
Carried to its logical conclusion this would nat- 
urally lead to the dissolution of any kind of imposed 
creeds or rules of conduct, and just as naturally the 



THE BASIS OF GERMAN NATIONAL LIFE 65 

doctrine was not usually pushed so far. But the im- 
plication was there, nevertheless, and the tendency. It 
is related on the one hand to the German mysticism of 
the Middle Ages and on the other to the idealism of 
Kant and his successors. And the mental attitude in- 
volved was what was meant when the Germans were 
described as the most religious of all the peoples of 
Europe. Hegel summed it up exactly when he re- 
ferred to the " ancient and constantly preserved in- 
wardness of the German people.'' 

So that a German of the end of the eighteenth cen- 
tury could find not only pride in the memory of the 
Hanseatic merchants and of Luther, in the glory of 
Bach and Handel, but a real standard for estimating 
the capacities and character of his people. Music 
was in a class of its own, difficult to analyze in its re- 
lation to the actual world but of unquestioned power 
and value. The Hansa and Luther in different ways 
exemplified the essential quality of practical initiative 
— the merchants in asserting and winning independ- 
ence and in making for themselves a great place in 
the commercial world, the reformer in throwing off the 
control of an ecclesiastical bondage of immense power. 
And Luther furthermore expressed three things that 
were held for ages to be fundamental elements of the 
German character — ■ spiritual freedom, the sense of 
duty, and " inwardness," the feeling that the kingdom 



66 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

of God, i. e., all wisdom and truth, is within you. 
So much for the things in which our imaginary Ger- 
man of 1789 might reasonably take some pride and 
comfort. But he might or might not have seen a cer- 
tain terrible and permanent significance in the age that 
followed the Diet of Worms. Luther had freed Ger- 
many from an external religious authority. He had 
substituted the authority of God alone, revealed by 
faith with the aid of God's word, the Bible. And 
then was seen a curious thing. The Germans, follow- 
ing their inner light, became split into sects, more in- 
tolerant as Protestants than they had ever been as Cath- 
olics, intent on minute points of doctrine and disci- 
pline, divided and dogmatic, superstitious and cruel. 
Their " inwardness " had betrayed them. Each one 
his own prophet, they displayed a fanaticism for the 
subjective religion framed in their own inner con- 
sciousness that they had never shown for the more ex- 
ternal religion that they had learned from Rome. 
Justification by faith implied liberty and service, 
Luther had said. The Germans made it imply intoler- 
ance and formalism. This " religio-ethical disease," 
as Professor Pfleiderer calls it, was simply the out- 
growth of a tendency to intense introspection that is 
faith caricatured and become pathological, an arrogant 
confidence in one's own broodings, a faith that despises 
experience and regards the wisdom of others as Satanic 



THE BASIS OF GERMAN NATIONAL LIFE 6j 

if it denies the glory of the idea evolved from the indi- 
vidual soul. And it is well to keep this in mind when 
we try to understand the modern German — the sub- 
jective idealism, the easy mastery by an idea, of one 
who will fight and die in indignant protest against an 
external authority. 

From the Reformation to the middle of the eight- 
eenth century individualism held sway in German 
thought. We do not speak of German politics be- 
cause the government of the German states was every- 
where autocratic and because political life did not exist 
as a national function. As always under an auto- 
cratic regime there were good rulers and bad, but in 
either case government was wholly the affair of the 
prince. The Germany of our time, the German na- 
tion, was still an unfused mass, and the German char- 
acter was to be seen only in fields other than politics. 
But so far as it could be estimated one could only say 
that the political divisions faithfully reflected the state 
of the German mind — the individualism that had ex- 
pressed itself in the Lutheran revolt reinforced by the 
spiritual arrogance, sectarianism and formalism that 
characterized Protestantism after Luther. Not that 
this unhappy aftermath of the Reformation was uni- 
versal; there were some — the Moravians, for ex- 
ample — who stood faithfully for a living and spir- 
itual religious life; but these were the minority. Un- 



68 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

til at last the German mind began to grow restive 
again, to give signs that it was about to break its self- 
imposed yoke of narrow externalism and fruitless 
pride in petty things. The beginning of the change 
was seen in Wieland and Lessing. And then the out- 
burst came in dazzling glory with the age of Herder, 
Kant and Goethe. 

With the last quarter of the eighteenth century Ger- 
many entered on a new era. It would be untrue to 
say that either individualism or subjectiveness disap- 
peared; indeed both became stronger than ever; but 
from whatever source there entered into German 
thought a new and immense vitality. It sought at 
first no expression in national unity, nor did it greatly 
concern itself with politics, though time and again 
there were signs that poets and thinkers were eyeing 
resentfully, with only half -restrained bitterness, the 
corruption of courts and the irresponsibility of the 
princes. But while there was in Germany none of the 
revolutionary spirit voiced in France by Voltaire and 
Rousseau, there was a vigor, a penetrating vision of 
reality, a breadth of interest in all aspects of life that 
was bound to act as a spiritual stimulus and tonic to the 
German people. The pettiness, the morbid introspec- 
tion and the formalism of the seventeenth and early 
eighteenth centuries gave place to a wide enthusiasm 
for all things human. And forms, whether of reli- 



THE BASIS OF GERMAN NATIONAL LIFE 69 

gion, poetry or politics were viewed as living embod- 
iments of the organic forces that had created them. 
New life always brings the possibility of revolution if 
the enclosing forms endeavor to restrain and smother 
it. But in this case if the possibility existed it did not 
show itself, or at any rate it developed slowly ; for the 
leaders of the revival were not particularly interested 
in politics, and their work in literature and philosophy 
was allowed to go on without interference; indeed it 
was encouraged by the princes, since it did not menace 
their privileges and did add to their glory. 

It would be an impertinence to attempt in the space 
at our disposal to discuss one of the golden ages of the 
world's literature and reflection. No one word or 
phrase will describe even the general tendencies that 
were represented by Kant, Fichte, Goethe, Schiller and 
their contemporaries. But if we might select one ele- 
ment in it all that was most permanent, most pro- 
foundly German, and most powerful in its effect on 
German thought, we should certainly name idealism. 
Akin, no doubt, to the same subjectivism, the same 
" inwardness " that had clouded the German mind in 
the sixteenth century it came this time not as an ob- 
scuring or disintegrating force but as a prophetic in- 
terpretation of life that affected the thought of the 
whole world. Later on indeed, as we shall see, it in- 
volved a lapse into idea-worship that might induce mis- 



JO RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

givings, but not at once. For the moment at least it 
was part of a magnificent effort to survey the whole 
world, to break all spiritual bonds, to clear away all ob- 
stacles of myth, prejudice and blindness that might 
conceal the truth, and to find the keys alike to the hu- 
man heart and to the ultimate secrets of life. 

Before we go farther we must clear up one possible 
source of confusion. We have already used the word 
" idealism " in relation to France ; we shall use it again 
in relation to England ; and here we are using it in rela- 
tion to Germany. And not only is it used in three dif- 
ferent senses in the three connections, but none of them 
quite correspond to its use in all languages to describe 
the famous doctrine of Plato. 

Idealism is a Greek word and Plato's philosophy 
gives us the one root from which the different mean- 
ings of the word have sprung. To state it briefly 
Plato's idealism represented belief in absolute reality, 
absolute truth, as against the apparent reality perceived 
by our senses. The world of appearances, the world 
we see and touch, is only a semblance ; it appears and 
disappears, it is solid or a mirage, it may be as vivid in 
the phantasms of a dream or of delirium as in the ap- 
parent certainty of our ordinary sensation, it changes 
its aspects, crumbles to dust, dissolves into impalpable 
gases, appears miraculously from seed or with a 
change of temperature, disappears just as miracu- 



THE BASIS OF GERMAN NATIONAL LIFE Jl 

lously at the touch of seen or unseen forces of 
disintegration; it is, in short, a world of phe- 
nomena, of appearances, not of reality. Yet at the 
same time it is a kind of parable, an allegory, conceal- 
ing and showing forth the truth as the body of man 
conceals and reveals his spirit. The great ruler of this 
visible world, the center and indispensable element in 
it, is the Sun, without which life would cease. Simi- 
larly in the real though invisible world of ideas there 
is a Sun, the center and source of all that is good, all 
truth and all life. The eternal search of the man seek- 
ing for wisdom is the search for more knowledge of 
this real world, and the ultimate wisdom is knowledge 
of what Plato calls the Form of Good, the ideal Sun, 
so to speak, which — if we like — we may translate 
God. 1 

Now all idealism is based on this conviction that the 
world of phenomena, the world of which our physical 

1 "The essential Form of the Good is the highest object of 
knowledge, and this essence, by permeating all created objects, 
gives them their value. And if we know everything else per- 
fectly without knowing this essence it will profit us nothing." 
Plato, Republic, 505. "In the world of knowledge the essential 
Form of Good is the limit of our inquiries and can barely be 
perceived; but, when perceived, we cannot help concluding that 
it is in every case the source of all that is bright and beautiful, — 
in the visible world giving birth to light and its master, and in 
the intellectual world dispensing, immediately and with full au- 
thority, truth and reason." Republic, 517. Cf. " Seek ye first 
the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these other 
things shall be added unto you." 



J2, RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

senses tell us, is not everything, but that there is a much 
more real and important world that we can neither see 
nor touch, that we can apprehend only with our mind, 
with our spiritual sense. 1 But this faith has taken 
various forms. The German tends to seek God and 
truth in his own soul, made in God's image and hold- 
ing all truth in itself even more truly than the tree is 
contained in the seed. The French tendency is more 
objective, to see in a creed, an institution or a gospel 
the visible formulation of an eternal truth and to fol- 
low it with passionate loyalty. The English tendency 
is also objective, but his idealism is based on experi- 
ence and he follows it cautiously, only believing it as 
he sees it embodied in fruitful form. Such a distinc- 
tion is indeed approximate rather than absolute, but it 
is in the main a true one. 

It may be prejudice that leads us to consider the 
English idealism the least dangerous of these, the least 
open to fanaticism. But we may balance such a state- 
ment by admitting that the German and the French 
will take mankind to higher levels, untrammeled as 
they are by the English insistence on solid standing 
ground. At all events it seems that the world needs 
all three, and the practical English speaking world has 

1 For example, we cannot see or touch a scientific law. We 
may see the results of the law of gravitation and the laws of 
motion, but we cannot see the laws themselves. 



THE BASIS OF GERMAN NATIONAL LIFE 73 

willingly acknowledged its debt to the more daring 
flights of the French and German mind. But French 
idealism is easier for the average Englishman or Amer- 
ican to understand than German. And when we do 
adopt German idealism in our thinking it is strongly 
modified by our conscious or unconscious pragmatism 
— our wish to see in an idea and a faith some definite 
bearing on actual life, some solid foundation in expe- 
rience. 

Yet we must at least try to understand the working 
of the subjective idealism that is so potent in the Teu- 
tonic mind. We shall not venture on a discussion of 
the philosophy of Kant or the development of what is 
known as transcendental idealism, but we may see how 
it acts in certain concrete instances. So it will be our 
task in the following chapter to study the German 
theory of the State and the modern social and economic 
Protestantism that has expressed itself in Marxian So- 
calism and the Social Democracy. In these we may 
see the principles that we have been discussing — indi- 
vidualism, the sense of duty, idealism — taking form 
in movements that have become potent factors in the 
modern world. 



Idealism in German Politics 

We have found that two historical facts could be as- 
serted regarding the Germans of the eighteenth cen- 
tury and the early nineteenth: in the first place they 
had been for centuries politically divided and ruled 
by despots ranging in power from the king of Prussia 
to petty knights whose domain was limited to a castle 
or a village — a long and severe training in submis- 
siveness; in the second place they had at one time or 
another proved their capacity for trade and collective 
action, for spiritual initiative, and for achievements of 
the first rank in literature, philosophy, and certain fields 
of art. We have found also that at least three German 
characteristics could be noted as apparently deep-seated 
— spiritual individualism, the sense of duty, and sub- 
jectiveness. The first and third of these characteristics 
might seem at times to be identical, but they were not 
necessarily so, and the acceptance of a subjective ideal 
might even lead to the temporary submergence of their 
individualism, might secure the full alliance of the 

74 



IDEALISM IN GERMAN POLITICS 75 

sense of duty, and result in an overwhelming religious 
or political fanaticism. The result of German his- 
tory and the working of the German mind had been 
disunion, the alternation of mighty assertiveness and 
lamentable collapse, and yet the assurance of great 
natural capacity. 

We have now to see whether these characteristics 
persisted during the period from the Napoleonic 
era to the present, and if so how they reacted to the 
modern world and its problems. And we shall try to 
answer these questions by studying the modern theory 
of the state and by noting the character of the revolu- 
tionary movement known as socialism. Both of these 
are essentially idealistic. Yet both illustrate the Ger- 
man paradox of intense concentration on the practical 
combined with equally intense worship of an idea. 
They are no more characteristic and no more instruc- 
tive than the history of German education or of Ger- 
man industry. But they have a very direct signifi- 
cance for our purpose. In our study of nineteenth 
century France we selected for discussion certain non- 
political aspects of the national life because these 
seemed more distinctive, more characteristic and more 
fruitful than any movement in French politics. But 
even the sides of modern German life that are not di- 
rectly political have been so largely dominated by in- 
tense nationalism that political thought and political 



j6 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

leaders have had a power and influence unprecedented 
in Germany itself and quite without any parallel in the 
modern world. Yet there has been no real break. 
Modern Germany is the older Germany in a new 
aspect. 

To the average Englishman or American a theory of 
the State is something academic, having little or no re- 
lation to practical politics. If forced to do so an Eng- 
lishman could doubtless formulate a theory, and if he 
did it would be based on specific facts of experience, 
Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the seventeenth 
century revolution. He might tell us, perhaps, that 
the State was the people organized for collective ac- 
tion, for government and defense, for the mainte- 
nace of law and order, for protection against menace 
from without and disruption from within, its prime 
requisites being strength on the one hand and freedom 
on the other. Its purpose and basis is individualis- 
tic, no matter how strong the national consciousness, 
how deep the unanalyzed love for England as Eng- 
land. Similarly the American might base his theory 
of the State on the Declaration of Independence and 
the Constitution. But except for argumentative and 
rhetorical purposes the -Englishman and the American 
alike would formulate his theory reluctantly and with 
difficulty. His devotion to England or the United 
States does not depend on a philosophy or on a formal 



IDEALISM IN GERMAN POLITICS JJ 

definition, and the warmth of his patriotism neither 
cools nor deepens with the framing of a political creed 
or the working out of a political philosophy. 

With the German it is otherwise. In the old days 
of division and despotism no theory of the state mat- 
tered, for the state was its prince, and according to the 
old maxim what pleased the prince had the force of 
law. But even then a thinker or a dreamer might try 
to ask himself questions about the real basis and rea- 
son of social life. The social contract idea had been 
familiar in European thought for generations before it 
was made famous and dynamic by Rousseau, but it re- 
mained academic in Germany as in England. The 
formula of " liberty, equality and fraternity " that was 
so full of inspiring grandeur to the Frenchman awak- 
ened but a cold response east of the Rhine. Abstract 
liberty meant little to the German, and equality even 
less. What he sought was some explanation for the 
state that could satisfy his reason more adequately, 
that would be at the same time more philosophical and 
more practical. And this he found in the organic 
theory of the state. 

Gradually developed in the later years of the eight- 
eenth century the theory of the state as an organism 
was fully stated by Hegel in his Philosophy of Right 
(1821) and it has had a power in Germany ever since 
that other peoples find it difficult to comprehend. It 



78 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

was not original with Hegel or with any other German 
thinker; it was based on Plato and Aristotle; but the 
Greek theory was like a seed planted in fertile soil, and 
it grew there until it became all-controlling. It was 
an idea that could be worked out in a philosopher's 
study by reflection, a half-truth that to other peoples 
was an interesting and fruitful suggestion but an ab- 
straction, not to be taken as a complete statement of 
the truth. But the Germans with their love for an 
idea evolved from thought and with their ancient ina- 
bility to see life as a whole, adopted the organic theory, 
applied it to their own political life, and saw nothing 
else. 

Its basis is the proposition that man is essentially a 
social being, that man as an individual, i. e., man apart 
from society, does not and cannot exist. Individual 
liberty is a myth; there is no such thing; liberty can 
only be social, and the man who tries to realize liberty 
apart from society will find himself degenerating to the 
level of the lower animals. As a rational being he is 
a member of a society, and the State is the form, the 
body, the actual realization of this rational, social 
freedom. The State is then an organism just as truly 
as a tree or a man is an organism, only it is a higher 
form. The man is a more perfect organism than the 
horse or the lion; but the State is a more perfect or- 
ganism still. And as the leaves and branches of a tree 



IDEALISM IN GERMAN POLITICS 79 

have no meaning apart from the tree, as the ringers 
and bones of a man have no meaning apart from the 
man, so the merchants, the farmers, all men whatso- 
ever have no meaning apart from the body politic — 
the supreme organism of the State. This was laid down 
in Aristotle, it was illustrated by Rousseau and Herder, 
it was accepted as part of his whole system of ideal- 
istic philosophy by Hegel. And it was adopted by the 
Germans just at the time when the pressure of painful 
facts predisposed them to some theory that would 
crystallize and rationalize thjeir newly awakened 
dreams of unity. 

For the Napoleonic wars had shattered the political 
system of Germany. Napoleon had crushed Austria 
and Prussia, had swept scores of petty princes from 
their thrones, had formed new combinations, had an- 
nexed some of the old principalities to France, given 
others to princes who were disposed to be friendly to 
the invader, had ended the shadowy Empire with its 
traditions of Charlemagne and Frederick Barbarossa, 
and had imposed his will on Berlin and Vienna, carv- 
ing and recarving, exacting tribute and distributing fa- 
vors or punishment as his sovereign will dictated. 
Thoughtful Germans watched with grief the humil- 
iation of the German name — a name so highly hon- 
ored in philosophy, literature and art, now so shamed 
in the field of politics. A new sense of patriotism was 



SO RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

awakened by the sword of a foreign conqueror, and 
the War of Liberation that finally drove the French 
armies across the Rhine was the first sign of the possi- 
bility of a united Germany. But if Napoleon's fall 
and the Congress of Vienna brought no attempt to re- 
vive the myriad principalities of the past it brought 
no real union. The dawn and triumph of German pa- 
triotism had left the German people with a sense of un- 
fulfillment. And the idea of the State as an organism 
came as a gleam of light. 

Moreover it was applied definitely to Prussia as a 
state that was already well on the way to maturity, the 
object lesson that showed their manifest destiny to the 
German people. Indeed all of the German states were 
to Hegel farther on the road to spiritual freedom than, 
for instance, France. For France was led astray by 
her false notion of equality, a notion utterly irrecon- 
cilable with the conception of the State as organic. 
The equality of fingers and eyes with heart and brain 
is an absurdity. The equality of men is just as absurd. 
Not only is it impossible to reconcile with facts but it 
involves the striving toward a wrong goal. Each man 
is most free when he is best fulfilling his function as a 
member of the State. If God has made him a me- 
chanic he should no more seek to be a statesman or a 
bank-president than the foot should seek to be an eye. 
And the same line of thought threw new light on the 



IDEALISM IN GERMAN POLITICS 8 1 

conception of duty. The firmly entrenched principle 
of a moral law was given a new and rational sanction. 
That was right which was in harmony with the whole 
organism, and the way was paved for the belief that 
what the State orders is beyond argument, a " categori- 
cal imperative." For the State is the embodiment of 
the social conscience as well as of the social reason and 
social liberty. Not that the moral, rational and free 
individual does not still exist; but individualism itself 
has meaning and value only in relation to the super- 
organism of which the individual is a functioning part. 
The individual and society are terms unintelligible ex- 
cept in relation to one another. 1 

As the nineteenth century went on it brought 
a steady rise in the influence and power of Prussia, 
and a steady trend toward an emphasis of the practical 
that was a new thing in German life. Voltaire's re- 
mark that France aimed at the sovereignty of the land, 
England of the sea, Germany of the clouds, lost its 
point. German perspective gradually altered, and of 
the new tendency in the direction of practical efficiency 
Prussia was the embodiment. Even before Bismarck, 
von Roon and von Moltke had completed the incom- 
parable political and military machine which struck 
down Austria in 1866 and France in 1 870-1, and be- 

1 See the clear and specific statement of this in Bluntschli, 
Theory of the State, bk. 1, ch. 1 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1895). 



82 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

fore the rising spirit of nationality had found its form 
in the German Empire, the organic theory of the State 
had begun to fade and a new one to appear. The idea 
of the State as an organism had indeed sunk so deeply 
into the German mind that its essential elements sur- 
vived and were carried on into the new theory. But 
to the vigorous and impatient minds of Bismarck and 
his supporters the organic idea had in it too much fa- 
talism, tended too much to make men let events take 
their course. 1 An organism grows by inner life, not 
by coercion and conscious construction. And the 
Prussians were eager to give German nationality im- 
mediate realization in a form that would bring glory, 
power, and leadership not in the clouds but in the ac- 
tual world. To the German thinkers of the sixties, 
the seventies and increasingly during the decades pre- 
ceding the war the State was not an organism but a 
structure ; or rather it was both, and its supreme qual- 
ity was Power. Der Staat ist Macht. 

The difference is the difference between the words 
organism and organisation. And the change was not 
simply the thinking out of a new philosophy but the 
reflection of Germany's new and intense national 
spirit. The people so long divided longed for unity; 
they looked resentfully on a past of impotence and 
longed for a chance to emulate France and England in 

1 Treitschke, Politics, vol. i, c. I. 



IDEALISM IN GERMAN POLITICS 83 

the fascinating arena of world politics. National pa- 
triotism meant national ambition, and Prussia with her 
" discovery of organization " was the obvious leader 
in the new quest. Individually powerless, ^powerless 
also in their separate states, the Germans threw their 
immense capacity for concentration into the realization 
of a state that should be the whole German people or- 
ganized in a political, economic and cultural unit. All 
that we have said regarding liberty and equality in a 
state conceived as an organism would apply still. The 
individual liberty and equality of the piston and the 
fly-wheel, of the leaf and the bark, of the foot and the 
hand are no more absurd than the liberty and equality 
of men as the French or the Americans conceive them 
in a perfectly organized state. 

And most Germans accepted this with willing enthu- 
siasm. Their old individualism was merged in the 
new nationalism, their old sense of duty was satisfied 
by the conviction that the voice of the State was the 
voice of God, and their old idealism found a new ob- 
ject of worship in the Fatherland and in the religion of 
Germanism. The new doctrine of the State as a living 
machine, an organism and yet not so much an organ- 
ism as the embodiment of German national strength, of 
the State as Power, was expressed most vividly and 
clearly by Treitschke. But impatient as is Treitschke 
with the purely organic theory of the State he is the 



84 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

legitimate successor of Hegel nevertheless. Organism 
had brought forth super-organism, the organic state 
had led to the super-state, the actualization of the power 
to strike, to expand, to hold together and to defend 
whose lack is the one unpardonable sin and whose ex- 
ercise and triumph is the one supreme political virtue. 

From the point of view of reconstruction then we see 
the Germans venturing during the last century to apply 
their idealism to politics, bringing to bear on their new 
religion of the State an immense national enthusiasm 
and a hitherto unsuspected capacity both for collective 
action and for practical efficiency. They found think- 
ers who formulated their creed for them and leaders 
who translated it into dazzling achievements. The 
Power which was the State turned on Germans a help- 
ful and kindly countenance, guiding each individual in 
the way he should go, giving a happy and obedient peo- 
ple a government by experts that was the wonder of 
the world; while to threats or restraint from without 
the same godlike State turned an eye of doom, pre- 
pared to annihilate all who should keep the German 
nation from its place in the sun. And such was the 
aspect of things in 19 14. 

But in November, 19 18, the structure reared by Bis- 
marck collapsed. The all-essential Power had proved 
inadequate. And what remains to be seen is whether 
the capacity for organization discovered during the 



IDEALISM IN GERMAN POLITICS 85 

last century will find itself able to effect a new ad- 
justment, to express itself in some more permanent 
form than the Prussian autocracy and bureaucracy had 
supplied. 

The growth of the German social democracy has 
thus a double significance. It is the resurgence of the 
old Protestant individualism, and it represents a theory 
of organization radically differing from that of Prus- 
sia. Whether it will result in dissensions and futilities 
or in a successful socialist state remains to be seen. 
Momentary discord is inevitable, just as momentary 
national humiliation is inevitable. The German peo- 
ple must pay the price of a difficult experiment just as 
they must pay the price of crimes to which — no mat- 
ter who was immediately responsible — they gave their 
consent and cooperation. The real, test will come 
not next month or next year but during the next gen- 
eration and perhaps the next century. 

What then is the goal and the vital force of German 
socialism? Strangely enough it too sprang from 
Hegel. It too is an attempt to realize the organic state, 
and its fundamental protest against the Empire as 
against all modern states lies in the contention that they 
are not organic and cannot be, that they are mechanical 
and rest on a false principle. The normal existing 
state rests on a contradiction — the separation by law 
and custom of the workers from the instruments of 



86 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

their work, land and capital. Ultimately all society 
rests on human labor. But labor is helpless without 
land and capital. And the system that keeps separate 
elements of production that are by nature and necessity 
bound together brings about class domination, the ex- 
istence and even often the despotic rule of idlers and 
parasites, the entire distortion of the body politic. The 
capitalist is able to exploit the laborer ; the land-owner 
is able to monopolize or use to selfish advantage fer- 
tile fields, indispensable highways, mines, strategic in- 
dustrial sites ; and these two working together create a 
condition worse than feudalism. There is only one 
remedy: the reorganization of the State, now dis- 
eased and deformed, so that labor will be unhampered 
and production be liberated from its present handicaps. 
When this is done the State will indeed be a true organ- 
ism, healthy and able to progress toward the full real- 
ization of human possibilities. 

German socialism found its great prophet in Karl 
Marx, its first apostle and leader in Ferdinand Lassalle. 
We need not here distinguish between these as found- 
ers of modern socialism. Arriving independently at 
similar conclusions they differed in method, and for a 
time their followers failed to see their common 
ground. Marx used as his medium first the Com- 
munist League of the forties, then later on the 
International Workingmen's Association founded 



IDEALISM IN GERMAN POLITICS 87 

in 1864; Lassalle worked through his Universal 
German Workingmen's Association founded in 
1863. But the aims of all these were essentially 
the same. In the words of Marx their pur- 
pose was that "of promoting among the work- 
ing-classes and other classes a self-conscious par- 
ticipation in the process of historical transforma- 
tion of society that was taking place under their 
eyes." Their challenge to the world was uttered in 
the Communist Manifesto of 1848, uttered in words 
that are as living to-day as when they were written: 
" The Communists 1 do not seek to conceal their views 
and aims. They declare openly that their purpose can 
only be obtained by a violent overthrow of all existing 
arrangements of society. Let the ruling classes trem- 
ble at a communistic revolution. The proletariat have 
nothing to lose in it but their chains ; they have a world 
to win. Proletarians of the world, unite ! " And the 
statutes of the International adopted at Geneva in 1866 
declared that " the economic subjection of the laborer 
to the possessor of the means of labor, i. e., of the 
sources of life, is the first cause of his political, moral 
and material servitude, and that the economic emanci- 
pation of labor is consequently the great aim to which 
every political movement ought to be subordinated." 

1 Communism in 1848 meant what Socialism means to-day 
Both words have changed their significance in the last fiftj 
years, but the confusion is only verbal. 



55 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

In 1875 tne followers of Lassalle and of Marx, rec- 
ognizing that their aims and principles were identi- 
cal, joined forces at Gotha in what was thereafter the 
German Social Democracy. The International flick- 
ered out and died. The Social Democratic Party- 
waxed in strength and solidarity until it became 
the standard of orthodox socialism, its platform 
based on the great work of Marx, Capital, 
the Bible of the movement. To the socialist 
Marx in this book destroyed the entire theoretical 
basis of capitalism, but it was far more than 
a monument of destructive criticism. It pointed the 
way to the socialist state as not only the only remedy 
but the inevitable goal toward which the world was 
moving. 

But the actual form to be assumed by the socialist 
state remained problematic. Marx himself and many 
of his followers have been content to point out the in- 
herent defects of the existing system, the rational basis 
of the socialist remedy, and the certainty of socialism's 
ultimate triumph. But the explicit practical program 
of government was to be determined by circumstances 
and by the march of facts. " Who could say," said 
Wilhelm Liebknecht thirty years ago, " Who could say 
what the socialist state of the future is to be? Who 
could foresee so much as the development of the ex- 
isting German state for a single year? " Like every 



IDEALISM IN GERMAN POLITICS 89 

other living thing the socialist state would grow and 
change as altered conditions brought the need for new 
adjustments. 

For the triumph of socialism was not regarded only 
as the triumph of right over wrong. It was the in- 
evitable result of social evolution. As absolutism had 
been replaced by feudalism, as feudalism had been re- 
placed by the rule of the bourgeois — each change a 
beneficent one and even the power of capitalism being 
regarded as a legitimate and necessary phase of social 
development — so the bourgeois state is to be replaced 
by the proletarian. With the victory of the workers 
the class war of the ages will end. As each class has 
won power it has exploited those beneath it. But there 
is no class to be exploited by the workers. Their su- 
premacy will represent the final victory of democracy. 

Here, then, is where the readers of the newspapers 
may take up the story. For socialism, after years of 
conflict with Prussianism, after a steady advance in 
numbers and power for sixty years, is confronted with 
the practical problem of government. No critic of the 
Social Democracy need feel undue satisfaction in the 
conflicts between Liebknecht and Ebert, between 
" Reds " and moderates. Socialism is not proved 
wrong or unpractical because socialists have different 
views as to details of procedure. The real test will 
come when the preliminary disputes are over and when 



90 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

a definite effort is made under fairly normal condi- 
tions to create a socialist state in Germany. And we 
can at least make this comment: that the intense de- 
votion of the Germans to an idea added to the German 
capacity for discipline and organization may lead us to 
expect that if socialism can succeed anywhere it can 
succeed in Germany. 

To prophesy in these days of rapid change is futile. 
The Germans had proved their genius in many fields 
long before 1871. Of their ability to form a political 
union that would be an adequate expression of their 
national life the German Empire of 1871-1918 was 
the first test. It has proved a failure; but the mar- 
velous achievements of the last fifty years indicate that 
while there was a fatal flaw in the machinery yet there 
was so much success that another experiment may well 
be tried without discouragement. And this time the 
German love for a doctrine evolved by thought is better 
satisfied than under the Empire. The German is ter- 
ribly Utopian, and he is at the same time terribly prac- 
tical. From his inability to see life as a whole, from 
his way of seeing only a part but seeing that part with 
an intense clearness and conviction have come his suc- 
cesses and his failures. It is now his task to take an- 
other dream, another idea, and to reconstruct by its 
light his shaken and disillusioned country. But if the 
reconstruction will follow a new plan its basis in the 



IDEALISM IN GERMAN POLITICS 9 1 

German character and in German history is very much 
what it was in 1871. And if we do not dare to predict 
the outcome it is because our faith in the solidity and 
virtue of that foundation has been so sorely shaken. 



VI 



The Russians and the Dawn of Russian 
Freedom 

When an American, a Frenchman or an English- 
man turns to the study of Russia he does well to recog- 
nize at the outset that he is entering an alien world. 
The peoples of western Europe, with all their differ- 
ences in language, customs, and attitude to life, are yet 
members of a common family; their lines of political 
and spiritual development have been intertwined for 
fifteen centuries ; to tell the story of any one of them 
without mentioning the others would be an absurdity 
that no one has ever ventured. For all western 
peoples look back to Rome. All were for ages com- 
mon children of the Catholic Church. All passed 
through the age of feudalism. All felt the impact of 
Mohammedanism and flamed with ardor in the Cru- 
sades. All awoke to new intellectual life with the 
Renaissance, and all were stirred by the religious rev- 
olution of the sixteenth century. 

But in all of these things Russia had no part. She 

92 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM 93 

never formed part of the Roman Empire. The juris- 
diction of the Pope never touched Kiev or Moscow 
The spiritual currents and storms of western Europe 
beat in vain against the invisible wall that stretched 
from the Baltic to the Bosphorus. And until two 
hundred years ago Russia was almost as completely out 
of touch with Europe as the planet Mars. The two 
worlds did indeed touch for a time at one point. In 
the tenth century of our era the Russians learned their 
first lessons in Christianity and civilization under the 
teachings of Greek missionaries from Constantinople. 
But before their education was well begun it was inter- 
rupted. At the time when representatives of the Eng- 
lish towns were meeting in the first House of Commons 
Russia was falling before the all-conquering Tartars. 
While the western peoples were slowly escaping from 
feudalism and feeling the first mighty thrills of the 
Renaissance, while Dante was writing the Divine Com- 
edy, while Giotto was reviving the art of painting, 
while Petrarch and Fra Angelico, Boccaccio and 
Chaucer were each in his own way leading men to new 
visions of joy and truth, Russia was still prostrate be- 
neath the rule of Asiatic barbarians. And even when 
a Grand Prince of Moscow led the way in shaking off 
the Tartar yoke ( 1480) it was only to consolidate Rus- 
sia into an autocracy of the Asiatic type. Under the 
'Czars as under the Khans the people bent submissively 



94 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

under the rod, obedient and inert. So that in the sev- 
enteenth century, when the men of the west were far- 
ing forth on adventures overseas, laying the basis of 
modern physics and astronomy, and facing the prob- 
lems of civil and religious liberty, the Russian people 
had yet to learn their first lessons in civilization as we 
of the west understand it. Under Grand Princes, 
Tartar Khans or Czars, they lived in semi-civilized iso- 
lation, content to toil or fight at the bidding of their 
masters, knowing nothing of the vigorous life of the 
outer world. 

The beginning of a new era came with Peter the 
Great (1689-1725). He found a people essentially 
Asiatic, their faces turned eastward. He undertook 
to reverse the current of five centuries, to make Russia 
European : and to ensure that his work should not per- 
ish with him he " broke a window " through the wall 
that separated his country from the peoples of the west. 
By the founding of St. Petersburg (Petrograd) he 
gave Russia her first port on a western sea. There- 
after ships, travelers and merchants came to the Neva 
and the ideas of the west filtered slowly in — slowly, 
for the window was a small one, and the people who 
had so long sat in darkness gave the incoming light no 
cordial welcome. But if the Russians found it hard 
to awaken from their Slavic inertia their princes saw 
vistas open for them in the west far more splendid than 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM 95 

a barren dominion over the steppes could offer, and 
bit by bit ambitious Czars made Russia a European 
power. Gradually and inevitably the Russians learned 
new and intoxicating lessons from western books. 
French, English and German literature and thought 
came to disturb age-hardened conservatism, to awaken 
new and startling ideas, to stimulate a desire for po- 
litical, social and intellectual liberty. The new light 
came only to the few indeed: the millions who culti- 
vated and traded over the vast plains between the 
White Sea and the Caspian, between the Gulf of Fin- 
land and the Ural Hills or in far Siberia, cared little 
for changes that touched only the leisure classes of 
Petersburg or Moscow. But by the opening of the 
nineteenth century the great current of Russian life 
was slowly shifting westward, and the work of Peter 
was bearing fruit. 

The nineteenth century went on. The French Rev- 
olution had brought its shattering and vitalizing mes- 
sage, and Russia had come within the storm-area of 
the Napoleonic wars. Western Europe was full of 
dreams of a new social order. Thrones were trem- 
bling and the nations were feeling their way toward 
free and conscious life. Even autocratic princes 
bowed to the genius of the new era, trying half blindly, 
sometimes willingly, and sometimes unwillingly, to 
avert disaster by conciliation and adjustment. Hesi- 



96 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

tatingly following the lead of the western rulers the 
Czar Alexander II liberated the serfs of Russia by a 
decree of 1861. Forty millions of peasants were 
freed from bondage to the land, cast adrift on the un- 
charted sea of personal liberty. 

Then came to Russia the Industrial Revolution, with 
its machinery, its railroads, its factories and 
its rapid growth of great towns. Peasants by tens of 
thousands passed from the quiet, unchanging life of 
the villages to the swirl and stimulus of the cities. 
The workers learned to talk and read; their minds 
were gradually stirred to interest in liberty; and they 
heard with eager curiosity tales of their brethren in 
other lands. The mental and social awakening that 
had been hitherto confined to nobles and students 
spread to the artisans. Army officers, landholders, 
and wage-earners found themselves comrades in a com- 
mon cause, sharers in a common aspiration. And the 
new life in conflict with the machinery of autocratic 
government brought to birth the strange and mighty 
force of nihilism. 

If we were to seek the spirit of Russia, the dreams, 
the hopes, the motive forces of the people during the 
latter half of the nineteenth century, where should we 
look? The histories speak of " Russia " fighting Eng- 
land and France during the Crimean War, fighting the 
Turks in 1877-8, being humiliated at the Congress 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM tyj 

of Berlin, entering into alliance with France. But 
was this really Russia, or was it a small group of offi- 
cials acting in the name of the Czar? Or were the 
Revolutionists the real Russia? Or are we to find 
the soul of Russia in the vast mass of the Russian peo- 
ple in town and country? Perhaps in all three. For 
it has happened that even a monarch or an aristocracy 
clothed with absolute power may in a measure ex- 
press the inarticulate soul of a people. It is surely 
not inaccurate to say that in a very true sense " Rus- 
sia " strove against Swedes and Turks to reach the 
sea highways and looked wistfully toward Constan- 
tinople both as a southern gateway and as a holy city 
to be redeemed from the infidels. 

But it is nevertheless true that we should be far from 
an understanding of the real Russia if we judged her 
only by the doings of autocrats, diplomats and gen- 
erals. At all events we shall leave the Czars to the 
political historians, or regard them only as their gov- 
ernment reacted on Russia herself. With conquests 
and diplomacy we have here no concern. We shall re- 
member the Emperor and his vast governing machin- 
ery only as an overwhelming repressive force, allied 
with the Church in a never-ceasing effort to keep things 
as they were, to keep the people devout and obedient, to 
discourage the dangerous habit of question and criti- 
cism. Our effort will be to pierce this rigid shell that 



98 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

sought to keep the Russian soul from a too restless 
wakefulness and to study that soul itself. For in the 
last twenty years the awakening has come ; the shell has 
been broken; and we need now to understand not the 
policy of Czars but the aspirations and character of 
the people. 

There is one essential contrast between the spirit of 
Russia and that of the west which tends to make 
Russia peculiarly difficult for an American to under- 
stand; and yet once the contrast is realized it helps 
much to throw light on the situation. Take, for in- 
stance, the Russian novelists — for a people's stories 
illuminate their character as does no other single form 
of expression — and compare them with ours. The 
tales of America and England are pre-eminently tales 
of action. Their heroes are men who do things, and 
even their tragedies are tragedies of struggle, of unre- 
alized ambition, of conflicts of will, of human enter- 
prise thwarted by destiny. Now the Russian novelists 
do not — with one exception to be noted later — 
dwell on action based on individual initiative, on am- 
bition issuing in decision, on the stubborn hardening 
of moral muscles braced to achievement, but on suf- 
fering, endurance, sorrow, submissiveness — rage and 
rebellion too, often, but rebellion frenzied, futile and 
passionate, as unavailing as a cry of pain or an oath. 1 

x As in Dostoyevsky's best known novel, Crime and Punish- 
ment. 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM 99 

Their people are the playthings of forces too great 
for them; they have dreams, aspirations, but that is 
all; and they drift to storm or safety, to tragedy or 
happiness with little will of their own. 

Take for instance, one of the best known characters 
in Russian literature, the Rudin of Turgenev. Gifted 
with surpassing power of clear thought, with eloquence, 
with real intellectual greatness and personal charm, he 
remains a failure. " Nature has given me much," he 
says in a letter of bitter confession, " but I shall die 
without doing anything worthy of my powers, without 
leaving any trace behind me. All my wealth is dis- 
sipated idly: I do not see the fruits of the seeds I 
sow. I am wanting in something ... A strange, al- 
most farcical fate is mine; I would devote myself ea- 
gerly and wholly to some cause, and I cannot devote 
myself. I shall end by sacrificing myself to some 
folly or other in which I shall not even believe." The 
trouble with Rudin could be stated in two ways : he 
lacked the will to make decisions, to express his ideas 
and his ideals in constructive action, so that he drifted 
with the tide of circumstance, a wasted genius; and 
he loved perfection with the ecstatic love of a mystic 
— he could neither compromise nor bring his mind to 
bear on the patient, toilsome work needed for the at- 
tainment of his high goal — as if Christian, in the 
great English allegory, had let himself be so rapt in 



IOO RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

his vision of the Celestial City that he stumbled and 
perished on the perilous road by which he had to 
travel. It is true that Rudin himself is a type of only 
a small group, the " intellectuals " of the forties who 
felt the inspiration of western thought but lacked any 
outlet for their enthusiasm and failed, not entirely by 
their own fault, to give their country any positive help 
toward a higher life. But his incapacity for construc- 
tive action is nevertheless truly Russian. The Polish 
novelist Henry Sinkiewicz has called it Vimproduc- 
tivite slave, the Slavic fruitlessness. And Rudin's 
combination of inertia — not mental inertia but inertia 
of the will — with high ideals made him a genuine 
type. " Every Russian " says Stepniak, " has in him 
a bit of Dmitri Rudin." 

Oblomov, in Goncharov's novel of that name, is 
quite unlike Rudin, but he too is a type of a man vir- 
tuous, gifted, yet with no power of initiative, of con- 
tinuous action directed to a definitely willed end. The 
typical Russian tragedy is the tragedy of futility. Yet 
one need not suppose that this paralysis of the will 
is inherent in the Slavic character. It may rather be 
interpreted as a submissiveness engendered by ages of 
rigid rule and unbroken isolation. It was apparently 
the will of God that they should obey others, and to 
this virtue of obedience they adjusted themselves. 
The thoughtful ones among them might react on the 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM 10 1 

situation with sadness or even with rebellion, but what 
was to be done ? And the millions who knew nothing 
of any other mode of life were not even mutinous. 

The literature of Russia is indeed a literature of 
almost unrelieved gloom — its sorrowful soul forever 
looking through bars or beating at them in vain rage. 
Of all the great Slavic writers Gogol alone — a child 
of the Ukraine, of Little Russia, a Cossack of the 
south, born and bred among a people of lighter heart 
than their brethren of the north — reflects anything 
of the gayety and joy of living that is a commonplace 
in western literature. Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyev- 
sky and their successors down to our own day paint 
a world full of failure, tragedy and intolerable sad- 
ness. But on the other hand the Russian people them- 
selves are not gloomy at all. They have been accus- 
tomed for centuries to conditions that a westerner 
would find unendurable, and they have learned to make 
the best of things. It is the will of God; why should 
we make matters worse by complaining? It is true 
that this submissiveness and cheerful endurance had 
its evil side in a certain animal brutality, in drunken- 
ness, in sensuality, and might break now and then in 
fits of ferocity and passion. But on the whole we may 
view the Russians as inert, uncomplaining, submissive, 
and yet gay and cheerful under the yoke, just as the 
negroes of the south sang and danced in the days of 



102 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

slavery. It seems strange, perhaps, to a free people, 
but there is nothing paradoxical or unusual in the 
gayety of slaves. 

But what would be paradoxical and unusual would 
be a light heart among slaves who have begun to dream 
of freedom. The incoming of ideas from the west 
might not touch the millions. But to the few it 
meant a blinding vision of a world of liberty and 
progress from which they were barred, not by nature, 
but by a rigid, repressive and corrupt system of gov- 
ernment. Thoughtful minds learned to feel the trag- 
edy of membership in a race whose very soul had be- 
come paralyzed and whose government, however cor- 
rupt and inefficient in its other activities, kept a watch- 
ful eye on the chains that kept the people enslaved. 
The gloom that we associate with Russian literature 
is the gloom of this awakened few, and the more pas- 
sionate of these found relief — according to their tem- 
perament — in religious skepticism, in science, in en- 
thusiastic study of western literature, in German phi- 
losophy, or in nihilism. And the appearance of nihil- 
ism is the one exception to which we referred above, 
the one element in Russian literature that shows the 
birth of a Russian will to act. The action might be 
blind, foolish, and for a time fruitless, but it was the 
beginning of the breaking of the shell. We have 
spoken of the submissiveness, the spiritual inertia of 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM 103 

the Russians as being their most visible characteristic, 
inducing a vast patience, an uncomplaining obedience, 
a broad tolerance and adaptiveness too, a plasticity 
that was the corollary of their utter lack of initiative. 
But after the middle of the nineteenth century we see 
a new spirit rising — a tiny spark at first, but flickering 
into a flame and finally bursting forth in our own time 
in the immense conflagration that we call the Revolu- 
tion. 

The word " nihilist " appears first in a novel of 
Turgenev, Fathers and Children (1862). A father 
and uncle, men of the old school, Nicolai and Pavel 
Petrovitch, are in conversation with a boy just returned 
from the University. The young man, self-confident, 
his head full of the new ideas he had picked up at col- 
lege, proud of the skepticism which he had learned to 
apply to all things, had brought home with him a 
friend, Bazaroff, and he thus describes his companion 
to the two older men : 

" Would you like to have me tell you, my dear uncle, 
what sort of person he is?" 

" Pray do, my dear nephew." 

" He is a nihilist." 

"What?" asked Nikolai Petrovitch; and Pavel 
Petrovitch elevated his knife, with a bit of butter 
sticking to the blade, in the air, and remained motion- 
less. 



104 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

" He is a nihilist," repeated Arcady. 

"A nihilist," said Nicolai Petrovitch. "That 
comes from the Latin nihil, nothing, so far as I can 
judge; consequently that word designates a man who 
. . . who recognizes nothing." 

" Say: ' who respects nothing,' " put in Pavel Petro- 
vitch, and devoted himself once more to his butter. 

" Who treats everything from a critical point of 
view," remarked Arcady. 

" And isn 't that exactly the same thing? " inquired 
Pavel Petrovitch. 

" No, it is not exactly the same thing. A nihilist 
is a man who does not bow before any authority what- 
ever, who does not accept a single principle on faith, 
with whatever respect that principle may be environed." 

But while this conversation was going on Bazaroff 
himself was off in a swamp hunting frogs for dissec- 
tion. He was a medical student and was interested in 
biology. That is to say, if he was an enemy of con- 
ventions, customs, the church and the government — 
a nihilist in that he bowed to no master and no princi- 
ple — he was yet a believer in experiment, a believer 
in truth that he could see and demonstrate. As Pavel 
Petrovitch remarked a little later Bazaroff " does not 
believe in principles but he does believe in frogs." 

Here then is the basal force in nihilism. Preceded 
by the kind of agitation for greater social freedom 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM IO5 

which was known in the west as Liberalism, agitation 
which might strive for freedom, a constitution, or even 
a republic, but which was ordinarily far from aiming 
at either destruction of all government or complete 
social reconstruction, nihilism sprang from the brutal 
repression of all criticism, all agitation even of the 
most insignificant kind which might threaten the ex- 
isting regime. One of the earlier reformers was ex- 
iled for saying in a private letter that he had seen a 
policeman kill a man in St. Petersburg. No manifes- 
tation of political discontent was too small to bring 
suspicion and punishment. And the new force, 
checked and stifled in its normal growth, spread under- 
ground and became — at least in its extreme manifes- 
tations — sinister, deadly and bitter, a force essen- 
tially negative and destructive that would wipe out the 
whole social order and begin life again on a fresh page. 
Not that all nihilists would have gone so far. But the 
extreme revolutionary wing gave their tone to the 
rest, and moderate men joined with anarchists and 
socialists because they saw no alternative but submis- 
sion. Thousands of earnest minds saw before them 
a definite choice between nihilism and the acceptance 
of a cruel and degrading tyranny. Some yielded to 
the " Slavic inertia " and turned their energies into 
lines permitted by the government. But many refused, 
and joined the ranks of " underground Russia." Dur- 



106 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

ing the decades of the sixties and the seventies militant 
nihilism grew and waxed fiercer, while liberalism faded 
and lost its influence. Even so radical a liberal and re- 
former as Mazzini would have seemed a moderate, a 
" reactionary," a defender of tyrants, among the ter- 
rorists of 1878. 

Yet liberalism, overshadowed as it was for a time by 
the impetuous ferocity of terrorism, did not and could 
not wholly disappear. 1 The great army united for the 
liberation of Russia must be thought of as consisting 
of two sections, — three, if we distinguish the terrorists 
as a separate group — allied for the common purpose 
but likely enough to develop mutual hostility once that 
common purpose was achieved. Or if the word " sec- 
tions " seems to imply too sharp a line of cleavage we 
may dismiss it and think of three modes of progress, 
one cautious and temperate, one impatient and passion- 
ate, a third reckless to the point of fury, three modes 
that shade into one another imperceptibly by infinite 
gradations. Moreover a liberal of to-day might be 
associated with nihilists to-morrow, and might even be 
a terrorist the day after. All desired freedom, and to 
the Czar all were revolutionaries, equally guilty, but 
they varied greatly both in creed and in enthusiasm. 

Let us take a concrete example. Two of the most 

1 This is further discussed in Chapter IX in its application to 
recent years. 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM IO7 

notable of the earlier reformers were Alexander Her- 
zen and Michael Bakunin. For twelve years the for- 
mer was an exile in France and England, while his 
friend spent two years in an Austrian prison, six in the 
dungeons of St. Peter and St. Paul at St. Petersburg, 
and four in Siberia. Both had begun as radicals and 
socialists, but one passed gradually to the ranks of lib- 
eralism while the other became an anarchist of the 
extreme type. A comparison of utterances by the two 
men late in the sixties shows clearly the direction of 
the two currents that in spite of all efforts to dam them 
both were sweeping Russia toward Revolution, two 
currents — to continue the metaphor somewhat reck- 
lessly — that might well meet and create a whirlpool 
once the revolution was accomplished. 

This first from a letter written by Herzen to Ba- 
kunin : 

" I will own that one day, surrounded by dead bodies, 
by houses destroyed by balls and bullets, and listening 
feverishly as prisoners were being shot down, I called 
with my whole heart and intelligence upon the savage 
force of vengeance to destroy the old criminal world, 
without thinking much of what was to come in its 
place. Since that time twenty years have gone by; 
the vengeance has come, but it has come from the 
other side, and it is the people who have borne it, be- 
cause they comprehended nothing either then or since. 



108 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

A long and painful interval has given time for pas- 
sions to calm, for thoughts to deepen ; it has given the 
necessary time for reflection and observation. Neither 
you nor I have betrayed our convictions; but we see 
the question now from a different point of view. You 
rush ahead, as you did before, with a passion of de- 
struction, which you take for a creative passion; you 
crush every obstacle; you respect history only in the 
future. As for me, on the contrary, I have no faith 
in the old revolutionary methods, and I try to compre- 
hend the march of men in the past and in the present, 
to know how to advance with them without falling 
behind, but without going on so far before as you, for 
they would not follow me — they could not follow 
me!" 

This, on the other hand, is from the Revolutionary 
Catechism inspired if not actually written by Bakunin : 

" The revolutionist is a man under a vow. He 
ought to have no personal interests, no business, no 
sentiments, no property. He ought to occupy himself 
entirely with one exclusive interest, with one thought 
and one passion: the Revolution. He has only one 
aim, one science: destruction. For that and nothing 
but that he studied mechanics, physics, chemistry and 
medicine. He observes with the same object, the men, 
the characters, the positions and all the conditions of 
the social order. He despises and hates existing mo- 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM 109 

rality. For him everything is moral that favors the 
triumph of the Revolution. Everything is immoral 
and criminal that hinders it. . . . Between him and 
society there is war to the death, incessant, irrecon- 
cilable. , ' 1 

These two men are both types, and between the two 
extremes of cautious liberalism and war to the knife 
there were multitudes whose sympathies, doubtless, 
were with the revolution, but who cannot be classified 
in any absolute way. Some were watchful but pas- 
sive. Some were active but not reckless. Bakunin 
undoubtedly had a large following, even though com- 
paratively few lived up to the ideal laid down in the 
Revolutionary Catechism. In the extreme cases we 
must admit that the Slavic apathy was broken in a 
frenzied rush to the opposite extreme. Submissive- 
ness gave place to fierce rebellion; inertia to a wild 
desire for action that was perhaps akin to the hysteria 
born of nerve-racking torment. This tendency was 
far from negligible; it issued finally in the terrorist 
movement of 1878 and succeeding years that many 
western minds associate exclusively with nihilism. 
But just as it is absurd to associate the French Revo- 
lution solely with massacres and the decapitation of 
aristocrats, so it is well, as we have already indicated, 

1 Both of these extracts are quoted from Rae, Contemporary 
Socialism, pp. 273-275 (New York, 1891). 



110 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

to distinguish, not merely between liberalism, and radi- 
calism, but between nihilism and terrorism. Those 
who think of nihilists and anarchists as men and 
women devoted primarily to the throwing of bombs 
and the murder of princes would do well to consider 
the life and activities of such a man as Prince Kropot- 
kin. A scientist of international reputation and a man 
of the most admirable kindliness and sanity, Kropotkin 
became a nihilist and an anarchist. And we venture to 
believe that few Americans — bearing in mind the 
Russia of his time — can read his Memoirs of a Revo- 
lutionist without honoring both his nihilism and his 
anarchism. 

For whatever we may think of the terrorists — the 
militant nihilists who responded to savage persecution 
by war against their oppressors — the revolutionaries 
of the Kropotkin type were simply men and women 
who deliberately set themselves to the destruction of 
the evil system that was crushing the life out of Russia 
by counteracting its poison. 1 According to tempera- 
ment and convictions they approved or disapproved 
of the terrorists, but they quite realized that the kill- 
ing of officials would not alone save Russia, and they 
bent their efforts to the moral and intellectual educa- 
tion of the people. The tyranny of the government 

1 See The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution, chap- 
ters 3-6. 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM III 

was possible only because of two things — the terrible 
apathy of the oppressed millions and the social conven- 
tions that crushed independent thinking and living, the 
labyrinth of customs that made life one unending 
slavery. If only the apathy could be broken, if men 
and women could be stirred to think and act for them- 
selves in absolute sincerity, then the chains would fall 
off of their own accord. It was not by killing the 
Czar but by the awakening of a free and manly Rus- 
sia that redemption could come. If even this type of 
nihilism often seemed to aim at destruction it was only 
as if a man encased in a shell should try to burst his 
shell simply because that was the obvious first step. 
But Kropotkin quite realized that even the bursting 
of the shell would be vain if the man thus freed should 
lie unchained but bewildered, helpless, passive, or if 
freedom brought a mad riot of passion or an aimless 
running to and fro. So the work of awakening the 
soul of Russia must be not only destructive but edu- 
cative; peasants and workingmen must be taught to 
read and think and taught to organize not only for re- 
bellion but for cooperation and mutual aid. 

Anarchism was to many a natural corollary of this. 
Government as the Russian knew it was bad through 
and through. That one man — merely because he 
had the name and uniform of a Czar, a chief of 
police, a soldier or what not — should be able to flog, 



112 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

imprison, exile or kill another man seemed unreason- 
able and wholly evil. To a nihilist this was one of the 
many irrational conventions that must be swept away. 
So he stood the enemy of government as of all the 
other " conventional lies of civilized mankind." To 
Bakunin this meant war. To Lavroff and Kropotkin 
war was necessary, no doubt, but a war not wholly of 
bombs and bullets. To them the best security against 
murder, meanness and dishonesty, the social ills that 
government was supposed — in theory — to combat, 
was the education that would make men hate these 
things, cease to be murderous, mean and dishonest in 
their hearts. Such an education would take time, 
would be a long and difficult process, but so much the 
greater reason for beginning at once. And in the 
meantime complete freedom would be infinitely prefer- 
able, naturally, to the rule of the Czar. For if people 
are free evils tend to correct themselves; those who 
are foolish or wicked are checked by public opinion; 
the leaven of education works slowly, but it does 
leaven the lump, and the gradual incoming of light to 
darkened minds will in time clear away the evil phan- 
toms and foul mists born of ignorance and degrada- 
tion. 

Whatever doubts and questions may arise in our 
minds as to all this it was at least a noble and fruit- 
ful doctrine. That it often brought distortion and 



DAWN OF RUSSIAN FREEDOM II3 

blunders no one could deny. 1 But in the meantime it 
represented the first gropings of Russia toward some- 
thing better than the old helpless and indolent submis- 
sion, the old Slavic apathy. So the Russia of the 
nineteenth century was a Russia breaking its shell, 
still uncertain and divided as to ultimate aim, but in- 
tent on freedom and some kind of reconstruction. 
What would issue forth no man could foresee. But 
there were certainly many of the " breakers " who 
tried to see that the Russian kindliness and patience 
should survive when the Russian paralysis of will 
should be cured, and that the new Russia — not to be 
created by the gift of princes or even by the legislation 
of Parliaments, but by the growth to manhood of the 
whole race — should stand on the broad base of a peo- 
ple free in soul, devoted to " liberty, equality and fra- 
ternity " as a matter of willing choice. And if the 
way was a long and arduous one, full of pitfalls and 
guarded by formidable giants of folly, despair and 
passion, yet the martyrs who in the evil days of the 
Czars died on the scaffold, in the dungeons, or in the 
Siberian mines, saw the Vision afar off, and were con- 
tent to be the vanguard of a host marching to certain 
victory. 

1 See Dostoyevsky's The Possessed for a portrayol of nihilism 
on its worst side. 



VII 

The Russian Problem and the Revolution 

" I would like in these last moments, before the 
great event of the years, that we should look to the 
end and to the immediate future, and in these last 
times ask ourselves, can we really do something, not 
in order to reach Constantinople, not in order to alter 
the map of Europe, but in order to save the national 
inheritance, an heirloom from the past which has 
fallen into our hands." 

These words were spoken by Alexander Fedoro- 
vitch Kerensky on the floor of the Imperial Douma of 
Russia a month before the abdication of Nicholas II. 
They state the essential problem of Russian reconstruc- 
tion, a problem which two anxious and discouraging 
years of revolution have in no way altered. Different 
leaders, different parties have given their various in- 
terpretations and have added this or that social gospel. 
But all hope that from the chaos will emerge a new 
Russia, her national inheritance preserved and liber- 
ated, the obstacles and handicaps to her progress dis- 
carded. It is our task to make the efforts toward this 

114 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 115 

end intelligible, to face the confusion and turmoil of 
the revolution and seek to clarify and simplify the 
course of events by isolating the essential facts. Much 
that is doubtful and bewildering will remain, but we 
may at least peer a little way through the smoke of 
battle and map out such guiding points as may help 
toward the comprehension of strategy and issues. For 
as Kerensky himself pointed out in another speech 
revolution is only destructive as a means to an end; 
it is constructive in its ultimate purpose, and only 
when it fails does it result in disorder and retrogres- 
sion. Our effort must be to see the essential aims in 
the Russian revolution, the struggles to form a solid 
basis on which reconstruction may go forward. 

We have already seen part of what Kerensky had 
in mind when he spoke of the Russian " national in- 
heritance." Let us see now the present phase of the 
revolution in the light of past phases, placing before 
our minds for the sake of clearness the outward ex- 
pressions of the revolutionary spirit in its ebbing and 
flowing during the last hundred years. The most ob- 
vious landmarks may be indicated by their dates — 
1825, 1861, 1881, 1905, and 1917, and in 1917 the 
three months of March, July and November. 

In 1825 the influence of the French revolution and of 
western liberalism moved a group of reformers — 
known in later discussion as Decembrists — to take ad- 



Il6 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

vantage of the death of Alexander I and the accession 
of Nicholas I by agitating for the enthronement of 
Nicholas' more liberal brother Constantine and the 
proclamation of a constitution. The movement was 
easily suppressed and the leaders executed or sent to 
Siberia. There followed a period of ferocious repres- 
sion that ended only with the death of Nicholas in 1855. 
His successor, Alexander II, gave promise of some- 
thing better, and for a time this promise was realized. 
The law courts were' improved, the persecution of 
liberalism was relaxed, and two great reforms were 
carried through, the emancipation of the serfs (1861) 
and the creation of local elected assemblies — Zemstvos 
for the country districts and Doumas for the towns. 
Both reforms were imperfect: the liberated serfs, sad- 
dled with a heavy debt for the purchase of their lands 
and often economically if not legally at the mercy of 
their former proprietors, found themselves frequently 
worse off than before, and the Zemstvos and Doumas 
were soon almost overwhelmed by a wave of reaction. 
But notwithstanding the gradual fading of the Czar's 
liberalism something was gained. It was difficult for 
the peasants to escape from economic dependence, but 
from their old legal bondage as serfs there had been 
no escape at all short of flight and outlawry. The 
Zemstvos and Doumas might be shorn of their power 
and the electorate might be limited, but they provided 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ill 7 

at least some medium for the expression of a will 
other than that of the government. 

It has always been true that the concession of 
some liberty leads to a vigorous demand for more. 
The real revolutionary agitation in modern Russia 
began in the sixties and became steadily more power- 
ful in each decade thereafter. Nihilism had existed, 
no doubt, in the forties and the fifties, but it was 
largely a speculative and intellectual movement, inef- 
fective in action and carrying no formidable threat 
against the existing system. But as Alexander II 
abandoned his movement for reform and relapsed to 
the repressive policy of his father, the disillusioned 
party of liberty took up the cause with renewed activ- 
ity; their anger burned away what was left of their in- 
dolence ; and without throwing aside their dreams they 
turned to action. Denied the legal right to freedom 
of speech, even to petition or to educate, the more de- 
termined ones declared war, and took to the only weap- 
ons left to them, the revolver and the bomb. So 
elusive and powerful did the invisible army of " un- 
derground Russia " become that the Czar almost 
yielded, and he was planning to give Russia a consti- 
tution when he was assassinated in 1881. 

As after 1825 and 1861, the forces of reaction and 
persecution became fiercer than ever after the murder 
of Alexander II. During the reigns of Alexander III 



Il8 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

(1881-1894) and of Nicholas II (1894-1917) the 
world saw Russia divided between two powers. One 
was the visible authority of the Czar and his officials, 
backed by police and army ; the other was the invisible 
but ever present and ever growing host of the Revo- 
lution. It was the same situation that one might have 
seen sixty years before in the Europe of Metternich 
and Mazzini. But even Metternich did not dare to 
crush and trample with the brutal thoroughness of the 
Czars; nor did Mazzini and his companions ever re- 
spond to persecution with the ferocious pertinacity of 
the terrorists. Then came the Russo-Japanese war 
of 1904. The defeated machine of Russian govern- 
ment, discredited and dismayed, broke before the at- 
tack of an indignant people, and the revolution won a 
decisive victory with the granting of a constitution in 
1905. But it was not final. The autocracy was hu- 
miliated and defeated but not beaten, and little by little 
it seemed to be winning back its power. The end came 
after the betrayals and the disasters of 19 15-16, and 
the abdication of the Czar in March, 19 17, left Russia 
a republic. But a republic without charts or rudder, 
and the anniversary of the Czar's abdication saw the 
country broken, disunited, insulted and robbed by the 
triumphant Germans. Russia had passed from autoc- 
racy to something very like anarchy. 1 

1 It is worth noting that each of Russia's great wars since 1850 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 119 

So much for the historical landmarks. Now let us 
make another step toward clear thinking by noting 
one or two significant facts as to territory and popu- 
lation. In the first place we must bear in mind that 
nearly all of the current statements regarding the Rus- 
sian people refer to only one section of Russia, the 
section known as Great Russia — roughly speaking, 
the northern half of European Russia, not including 
Finland, the Baltic provinces, or the sub-arctic regions. 
This was the older Russia; in it lay the three cities 
that were the successive seats of government before 
the founding of St. Petersburg — Novgorod, Kiev 
and Moscow; it was, in fact, the nucleus of the Rus- 
sian Empire. But the colossal empire of a 19 14 map 
covered far more than Great Russia, and it is per- 
haps the map with its uniform coloring that deceives 
us sometimes into thinking of the people governed by 
Nicholas II as homogeneous, all Russians. The truth 
is, of course, far otherwise. Something like a hun- 
dred millions of the population of the Empire were not 
even Slavs. The Russia of the Czar was a vast, corn- 
has seemed to bring about a political crisis. The Crimean War 
of 1854-6 was followed by the reforms of Alexander II; the 
Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 was followed by the activities of 
the terrorists and the murder of the Czar; the war with Japan 
was followed by the forced concession of a constitution ; and the 
Great War brought on the final crisis of 1917. It was as if the 
rigid, artificial machinery of state could never meet a severe 
strain without cracking and threatening collapse. 



120 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

plex mass held together solely by the military power 
of an autocrat. Within its area of over eight million 
square miles it is estimated that 103 languages were 
spoken. The Turcomans of the Trans-Caspian desert, 
the Georgians of the Caucasus, the Tartars of the 
Volga, the Poles of Warsaw, and the peasants of Great 
Russia were as radically different in race, traditions, 
religion, customs and tongue as Mexicans and Ameri- 
cans, Spaniards and English. To millions of these 
no study of the spirit or destiny of Russia will apply 
simply because they were part of Russia only by an 
external bond, common subjection to the Czar. 

The economic cleavage of population was not so 
profound but it was far from negligible. Eighty to 
eighty-five per cent of the Russian peoples, both in 
Great Russia and the provinces, were and still are 
peasants, agriculturists, intensely conservative, sub- 
merged in the Russian apathy, ignorant, patient and 
submissive, indifferent or hostile to the Revolution 
in all of its phases except one, the matter of the land. 
Only among the workingmen of the towns, the stu- 
dents of the Universities, the more liberal sons of the 
landed nobility x and the professional classes can we 

1 This may occasion surprise among those who view the nobles 
as invariably narrow and moved by class feeling, but it need not. 
Tolstoy, Kropotkin and Catherine Breshkovsky, to name the 
three revolutionists best known to Americans, were all " aristo- 
crats " by birth. 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 121 

expect to find signs of real intellectual movement, and 
it is in this numerically small group that we must look 
for the spirit of the Revolution. 

It is true that the revolutionary leaders spoke with 
enthusiasm of the " people," based their hopes on the 
peasants, and often regarded the village Mir — the 
democratic commune of European Russia — as the 
ideal community of the future. But it was almost im- 
possible for the most earnest of the missionaries of the 
revolution to move the peasantry to action. Nothing 
in the story of modern Russia is more tragically amus- 
ing than the account by Catherine Breshkovsky, the 
" little grandmother of the Revolution," of the effort 
of the reformers to stir the sluggish souls of the " peo- 
ple." 1 Many of the leaders deliberately accepted the 
conclusion that education was more important than 
revolt, and that a long period of slow and difficult edu- 
cational agitation must precede any successful attempt 
to make Russia politically free. Others simply put 
the peasants to one side in their immediate calculations 
and resolved to depend solely on the educated minority, 
to free Russia by revolution and trust to the future for 
the political and spiritual emancipation of the peasants. 

" You," wrote Turgenev to some of the enthusiasts, 
" are supposing that revolutionary or reformatory ele- 

1 The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution, chapters 
4 and 5 (Boston, Little, Brown & Company, 1908). 



122 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

ments exist in the people. In reality quite the oppo- 
site is true. Revolution — in the true and concrete 
meaning of the word; I might say, in the largest mean- 
ing — exists only in the minority of the educated class ; 
and this is quite sufficient for its triumph, if only we 
do not extirpate ourselves by our mutual quarrels. . . . 
The role of the educated class in Russia is to transmit 
civilization to the people, in order that they may them- 
selves hereafter decide what they shall accept or re- 
pudiate." But in the meantime the people themselves, 
or at any rate the peasantry of over one hundred mil- 
lion souls, " are conservative par excellence; in their 
sheepskins, their warm and dirty hovels, they foster 
the germs of a bourgeoisie which will leave the ill- 
famed western bourgeoisie far behind." It is the old 
story of all peoples, that advance and redemption are 
the work of the few, and that if the work be well done 
the many, in the fullness of time, reap the reward. 

The student of modern Russia must then do three 
things. He must first frankly recognize the complex- 
ity of the whole problem. Then he must fix firmly in 
his mind the external landmarks which we have indi- 
cated above until such dates as 1861, 1905, 19 17 bring 
an instant and exact association with definite events. 
And finally he must forget the deceptive word " peo- 
ple," regard as distinct elements in the situation the 
peasants, the proletariat or wage-earners, the business 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION ' 1 23 

and professional classes, and concentrate his attention 
on the one dynamic element in modern Russia, the Rev- 
olution. So far as we are concerned the history of 
recent times means the history of the movement that 
began in the liberalism of 1825, brought about the 
emancipation of the serfs and the creation of zemstvos 
and doumas, became at once broader and more intense 
in the sixties and seventies as nihilism, developed after 
1878 the fierce aspect of terrorism, took to itself the 
lessons of Marxian socialism after 1883, finally over- 
threw the autocracy, and then parted into battling fac- 
tions after the victory was won. 

We shall confine our view then to Great Russia and 
to the small but intensely alive minority there who 
aimed through weary years and decades at the redemp- 
tion of their country through revolution. If the revo- 
lution should overturn Czarism the outer rim of the 
Empire might be expected to drop away — temporarily 
at any rate — and form independent states, Poland, 
Finland, Ukraine, Georgia, the units of Central Asia, 
Siberia and the rest, each to work out its own salvation. 
They might ultimately form a federal state, as loose 
as the British Empire, as close as the United States 
of America, or they might not. But in any case they 
are not our immediate concern ; the possibility of a free 
federation of all the sections that once made up the 
Russia of the map is for the future to determine. For 



124 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

the moment we must regard the provinces as separate 
problems and concentrate on Great Russia, the nucleus 
around which the whole heterogeneous empire had been 
built. 

For Great Russia was a natural unit which would 
probably stand or fall, become free or remain en- 
slaved, as a single social group. Of its population of 
about sixty millions ten per cent might perhaps con- 
stitute the revolutionary element, though this is little 
more than a guess. The rest were either indifferent or 
loyal to the existing regime, and of these the indiffer- 
ent, the passively loyal, included nearly all the peasants, 
the vast majority of the population. Not that the 
peasants were contented. They were not. But their 
sole interest was in secure possession of their land, not 
in political change ; they blamed their ills on landlords, 
agents, officials and the like, not on the Czar ; and their 
longing for relief from their burdens was inarticulate, 
blind, undirected to any program of action. The 
actual burden fell on the few who saw — some clearly, 
some dimly — the vision of a free Russia, and who 
were resolved to make it a present reality. 

These, varying greatly in their intensity of convic- 
tion, in their honesty of purpose, and in their beliefs 
as to the paths to be followed, may be grouped in three 
main classes: the liberals, the anarchists, and the so- 
cialists. Of these the anarchists, a great force in the 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 12$ 

nihilism of thirty and forty years ago, had ceased 
long before 19 17 to be a considerable element in the 
revolution. We may, perhaps, ignore anarchism there- 
fore, and consider liberalism and socialism as the two 
great forces that have moved Russia during recent 
years. Remembering, however, that they are both 
only an expression and a formulation of something 
infinitely greater than either — the passionate desire 
for liberty. In the breasts of peasants, factory work- 
ers, merchants, students, of every thinking Russian 
indeed except the Slavophils and those whose interests 
or whose prejudices bound them solidly to the auto- 
cratic regime, surged the yearning for relief from 
an intolerable burden. Often the burden was felt 
merely as a physical one and was purely economic — 
a tyranny not clearly localized or diagnosed but in- 
volving actual hunger and suffering. Often it was a 
spiritual one, the forbidding of normal and compelling 
intellectual, social or ethical activities. Often it was 
a generous resentment at the sight of good men and 
women sent to prison or to Siberia, of innocent people 
shot down or tortured. Often it was negative, hardly 
at all constructive. But with all its varieties of mo- 
tive and aim it was fundamentally a movement of op- 
pressed humanity against an inefficient, brutal, irra- 
tional machine, and it did take the two main forms of 
liberalism and socialism. 



126 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

To one who has studied the liberalism of western 
Europe the liberalism of Russia — active in 1825, 
dormant for fifty years, then active again towards the 
end of the 19th century — is not difficult of compre- 
hension. The liberal may be ready to recognize that 
many of the evils from which the people suffer are 
economic. He knows that there is wretchedness and 
degradation in America and England notwithstanding 
their free institutions. He may admit to the full the 
contention that there are deadly ills in society that have 
apparently little or nothing to do with politics. And 
he may even admit that private ownership of land and 
capital has something to do with social ills and may 
well be examined, placed under restrictions, perhaps 
be limited or abolished. But he .is primarily inter- 
ested in the securing of politcal liberty. Once the 
state is made essentially democratic, once government 
of the people is firmly established, once freedom from 
arbitrary imprisonment, arbitrary taxation, arbitrary 
legislation and an irresponsible executive is definitely 
secured, then social reforms may be carried through 
according to the wish of the sovereign people. Politi- 
cal liberty is the foundation stone. Without it noth- 
ing permanently good is likely to be achieved, welcome 
as the isolated good deeds of an autocrat — such as 
the emancipation of the serfs — may be. With it an 
infinite degree of progress becomes possible. 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1 27 

Moreover political liberty is a fairly definite and spe- 
cific thing on which all may agree and which the expe- 
rience of America and western Europe has shown to be 
perfectly feasible. Social reform, on the other hand, is 
a slow and difficult matter, and a social and economic 
revolution is formidable beyond anything the human 
race has yet attempted — formidable not only in its 
inherent difficulty and complexity but in the fact that 
many good and wise men are opposed to it, perhaps 
even the majority. To defy a tyrant and to substi- 
tute for tyranny government by the people is a matter 
in which all may unite; but to defy one's own loyal 
comrades in the midst of the battle and to excite dis- 
union and internal dissensions while the struggle is 
still going on is unwise. Liberalism, therefore, aims 
primarily at political liberty — government by the 
people. 

Now the Czar who had emancipated the serfs, Alex- 
ander II, had also instituted popular representative 
assemblies, the Zemstvos in the country districts and 
the Doumas in the towns. These had been so restricted 
both as to electorate and as to power that they came 
to be of little significance in actual government. Still 
they provided a starting point. All that needed to be 
done was to make these bodies really representative, to 
give them a large local power, and to institute a simi- 
lar assembly — an Imperial Douma — that would rep- 



128 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

resent the whole people. Then with these local and 
national popular legislatures and the erection of an 
executive responsible solely to the people or to the peo- 
ple's representatives, liberty would be assured. There- 
after social reforms would be in the hands of the peo- 
ple, and could go on as they go on in America, Eng- 
land or France — too slowly for the impatient, per- 
haps, but keeping pace with the desires and progressive 
enlightenment of the nation. This program could be 
entered upon, if such seemed desirable, even with the 
Czar on the throne. England and Italy have kings, 
and the most far-reaching of the reforms of the French 
Revolution were carried through between 1789 and 
1792, while Louis XVI was still king of France. Or 
a republic could be organized. The matter of mon- 
archical or republican form was a detail and not a 
fundamental one. The essential thing was to place 
the actual government in the hands of the people, to 
remove the intolerable burden of arbitrary and irre- 
sponsible rule, to achieve liberty. 

In this spirit the Revolution of 1905 was begun and 
carried through. It was to a great extent a failure. 
It did see the creation of an Imperial Douma, but the 
executive machinery and the bureaucracy remained be- 
yond popular control, and the Douma between 1907 
and 19 1 7 was an empty form, a debating society, po- 
tentially of immense value but devoid of actual power. 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1 29 

It was in these years that the government of the Czar 
was proved incurable, — rigid, faithless, corrupt and 
blind. So in March, 19 17, the Revolution reached its 
second phase ; the Czar abdicated ; and from March to 
July the government of Russia was in the hands of lib- 
erals supported by the moderate socialists. 1 Then a 
third wave of revolution in July swept the liberals from 
power ; the great socialist leader Kerensky became head 
of the government; and he in turn was overthrown in 
November by the more extreme group known as Bol- 
sheviki. Socialism had supplanted liberalism at 
Petrograd. 

And when we say socialism we mean Marxian so- 
cialism. As we use the word in ordinary careless 
speech it is apt to mean almost any movement that 
seeks to abolish distinctions of class and wealth. If 
we use it more carefully we mean, usually, any move- 

1 In this first Provisional Government the best known figures 
were Prince Lvoff, the Premier, Professor Miliukoff, Minister 
for Foreign Affairs, Gutchkoff, Minister of War, Tereshtchenko, 
Minister of Finance, and Kerensky, Minister of Justice and then 
after Gutchkoff's resignation Minister of War. Kerensky was 
the link between his colleagues and the Radicals of the Council 
of Soldiers' and Workmen's Deputies. 

For the most part we have still to rely on periodicals, notably 
the New York Times Current History, for such knowledge as 
has been available for the last two years. But there are three 
interesting and informing narratives that taken together give a 
connected story of the successive phases of the revolution, Mar- 
cosson's Re-Birth of Russia, Ross, The Russian Upheaval, and 
Ernest Poole, The Dark People. 



I30 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

ment that will bridge the gulf between labor, on the 
one hand, and capital and land on the other. We think 
of the familiar argument that labor really produces all 
wealth, but that labor is helpless without capital and 
land; that consequently labor is the slave of capitalists 
and land holders ; and that the correction of this evil — 
a far more fundamental evil than any merely political 
tyranny — is the great social problem of the present 
and future. In a general way this is a reasonably true 
conception of socialism. But as to the actual means 
of realizing this aim socialists have been far indeed 
from agreement, and the dominant socialism of to-day 
is that which has followed the leadership of Karl 
Marx. We have already indicated the nature and 
development of Marxian socialism in Germany. We 
have now to see what it means in Russia. 

It will be remembered that the reforming move- 
ments of 1825 to 1 86 1, the nihilist movement after 
1866, and the terrorist war of assassination that began 
about 1878 were all movements of no single creed. 
They were inspired largely by the great spiritual forces 
that were stirring England, France, Germany and 
Italy, and they aimed at the attainment of liberty — 
whether by the education of the masses, by painfully 
won political and social reforms, by the killing of 
Czars and chiefs of police, by the centering of all 
functions of government in the Mir — the village com- 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION I3I 

munity — or by anarchism, the total destruction of all 
government by armed revolution. Their leaders were 
men like Herzen — a socialist of the older type who 
would be content to go slowly, keeping, as he said, 
" one step ahead of the people but not two steps " — 
like Lavrov or Kropotkin, educational anarchists who 
believed in missionary work that would gradually bring 
the people up to the necessary level of enlightenment 
and initiative for the realization of a stable and wise 
freedom — and like Bakunin, a revolutionary anarchist 
who would clear away in one wild conflagration all the 
accumulated rubbish of laws and governments and go 
back to a " state of nature." And there were all de- 
grees of radicalism and passion from Bakunin and the 
terrorists to the thoughtful but passive ones who de- 
spised the existing power and sympathized with the 
malcontents but who could not make up their minds 
to action or who feared the tempest that a successful 
revolution would let loose. All of these were in agree- 
ment as to criticism, as to negation ; but as to the path 
of positive advance they differed greatly, their doc- 
trines only resembling one another in their " Utopian " 
idealism. 

But in the years after the murder of Alexander II, 
i.e., during the reigns of Alexander III and Nich- 
olas II, Marxian socialism began to filter into Russia. 
Anarchism and communism gradually lost their hold. 



132 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

Professor Miliukov could say in 1905 that " no 
anarchism exists in Russia." It had had its day when 
the only hope of a desperate people seemed to lie in 
destruction. Not that philosophical anarchism has 
not its constructive side. It has. But it is not the 
side that appeals to the average man simply because 
its Heaven is a distant one, to be attained by labor, 
education and self-restraint. To most of its disciples 
anarchism has always meant destruction and little else, 
a most natural and human war-cry when one is smoth- 
ered and tortured by a powerful and deadly force, but 
not a permanent ideal. So that Marxian socialism 
with its collective ownership of land and capital pro- 
vided just what anarchism and communism lacked — 
a logical, scientific basis, a definite, constructive pro- 
gram, liberation from both economic and political op- 
pression, a golden vista of a road to the heights that 
was solidly based — it was thought — on reason and 
facts, that was free, orderly and final. And it had 
a clear and compelling slogan : " Workers of the 
world, unite ! " 

So anarchism faded away. The older socialism of 
the commune became out-of-date. Those of the revo- 
lutionaries who felt that whether Marx was right or 
wrong social reform should be postponed and a demo- 
cratic state achieved before anything else was at- 
tempted gathered in the liberal party of the Constitu- 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 133 

tional Democrats or Cadets, and with these went many 
of the older warriors of the cause, the enemies of the 
Czar rather than of the capitalists. But the more im- 
passioned radicals adopted the Marxian doctrine with 
enthusiasm. The strength of the Cadets lay in the 
professional and business classes, the bourgeois; the 
strength of the socialists lay in the proletariat of the 
towns; and holding aloof from both parties stood the 
great mass of the peasants with their one political 
creed and demand, the land to the cultivator. 

Early in the revolution it became evident that the 
socialists were likely to dominate the situation. And 
then appeared the familiar conflict between extremists 
and moderates. There was little or no disagreement 
between, let us say, Kerensky and Trotzky as to the 
ultimate goal. Both believed in the socialist state. 
But Kerensky, like Marx himself and like the majority 
of Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries 
throughout the world, regarded the attainment of the 
socialist ideal as a matter of organic growth, no more 
to be realized in the twinkling of an eye than a child 
becomes a man over night. Thus, for instance, there 
was universal agreement as to the redistribution of the 
land. But even Kropotkin, anarchist as he was, agreed 
with the moderate socialists in regard to the complexity 
of even so necessary a reform and advised against 
haste on the grounds that it would mean confusion, in- 



134 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

justice, and infinite quarreling. One may condemn a 
cancer and may also condemn its removal by one sweep 
of the knife. But to a certain temperament such hesi- 
tancy smacks of treason, and it is always easier for 
the impatient fanatic to win the applause of an un- 
disciplined multitude than it is for one more cautious. 

From the outset of the revolution the Council of 
Soldiers' and Workers' Deputies — practically all ex- 
treme socialists or Bolsheviki — were a thorn in the 
side of the Provisional Government and the Douma. 
The Council represented the proletariat, not the people, 
and it had all the fury and fanaticism of the Jacobin 
Club, with the same fervor for a gospel that was to 
bring confusion to tyrants, i.e., the bourgeois, and a 
golden age to the faithful. Its leaders were advocates 
of immediate and radical reconstruction on socialist 
principles. Their fierce enthusiasm led first to the 
retirement of the liberal ministers of the Provisional 
government, then to the retirement of Kerensky, then 
by a pathetic irony to the exile of men and women who 
had suffered under the old regime, who had borne for 
years the burden of the revolution, and who were now 
spurned by the wild ardor of those who reaped where 
others had sown. 

And so we have Bolshevist Russia, a marvel and a 
portent to the world throughout 191 8, crumbling now 
and perhaps to give way to a new phase before another 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1 35 

month is past, but still dominant in Petrograd as these 
words are written. Here is part of its platform : * 
i. To effect the socialization of the land, private 
ownership of the land is abolished, and the whole 
land fund is declared national property and trans- 
ferred to the laborers without compensation, on the 
basis of equalized use of the soil. 

2. The Soviet law of labor control and the Su- 
preme Board of National Economy are confirmed, 
with a view to securing the authority of the toilers 
over the exploiters, as the first step to the com- 
plete transfer of all factories, mills, mines, railways, 
and other means of production and transportation 
to the ownership of the Workmen's and Peasants' 
Soviet Republic. 

3. The transfer of all banks into the ownership 
of the Workers' and Peasants' state is confirmed, it 
being one of the conditions of the emancipation of 
the laboring masses from the yoke of capital. 

4. With a view to the destruction of the parasitic 
classes of society and the organization of the na- 
tional economy, universal labor service is established. 

5. In the interest of securing all the power for the 

1 Taken from the Nation (New York) of December 28, 1918. 
These paragraphs are contained in a resolution submitted by 
Lenine and Trotzky to the Constituent Assembly that met Jan- 
uary 18, 1918. The Assembly proved to be hostile to Bolshevik 
rule and was dissolved after one stormy session. 



I36 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

laboring masses and the elimination of any possi- 
bility of the reestablishment of the power of ex- 
ploiters, the arming of the toilers, the formation of 
a socialistic red army of workmen and peasants, and 
the complete disarmament of the wealthy classes are 
decreed. 

It is a document well worthy of careful study, apart 
altogether from our opinions as to the validity of its 
principles. German in its origin, the program is ab- 
solutely Russian in its mysticism, in its adoration of a 
light that dazzles and fascinates — sadly Russian 
moreover in that the light came from the west, and that 
its alien beams lit only the spiritual mountain tops, 
leaving in darkness the brutal facts. 

For the Germans were in Poland and Riga, and there 
were a hundred million people in Russia to whom the 
" class war," capitalistic tyranny, the emancipation of 
the proletariat were words without meaning, who cared 
nothing for votes and seats in Parliament, and whose 
sole desire was land to cultivate and the opportunity 
to live in peace. 

As these pages go to press Russia is still torn by 
factions, and Poland, Great Russia and the Ukraine 
are in the agony of a civil war that may be ended or 
may be embittered — we can only hope the former — 
by the allied army of intervention that is fighting its 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 137 

way toward Petrograd. Whatever be the outcome of 
these turbulent and wretched months, the issues will 
remain between the moderate socialists, the Bolsheviks, 
and the liberals, for the peasants as a whole are of no 
party and desire only peace. Bolshevism is probably 
only a phase and a passing one. It is simply socialism 
consumed with a human but futile passion for immedi- 
ate realization. As to socialism itself one hesitates 
to make any absolute pronouncement, but it is permis- 
sible to express an opinion. To say that it is German, 
not Russian, is true but not particularly significant; it 
is unfortunate, perhaps, but certainly not disastrous 
that Russia has often owed her ideas to the west, is 
facile in borrowing and adapting. 1 It is more signifi- 
cant to point out that the Marxian gospel is essen- 
tially a gospel for a highly industrial society. Marx 
wrote Das Kapital in England, and he himself believed 
that England, the workshop of the world, was ripe for 
his doctrine beyond any other country of his time, 
while of Russia's 180,000,000 possibly ten per cent 
are real proletarians. As has often been remarked 
the Russian temperament and tradition is in its own 
way intensely democratic, but it is not particularly 
Marxian. Tolstoyan anarchism is infinitely more 

1 " We Russians have chosen to live on other people's ideas, 
and we are saturated with them," says a student in Dostoyev- 
sky's Crime and Punishment. 



I38 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

truly Russian than is socialism, and even orthodox so- 
cialism in Russia would, one suspects, become its own 
antithesis, government by the few — and those few 
not the workers. So that even the more moderate 
forms of socialism would seem to be alien and aca- 
demic, little related to the national life of Russia. 

Whether the present disorder will lead to reaction, 
or whether foreign intervention will produce new dis- 
eases, or whether the fervor of 19 18 will insensibly 
die away into some workable scheme, socialistic or 
otherwise, remains to be seen. It would indeed be a 
daring prophet who would venture to forecast the 
progress of events during the next year or the next 
month. The poetic mysticism, the uncompromising 
idealism, the noble sincerity that are the outstanding 
characteristics of the Russians, the immense patience, 
ignorance, credulity and conservatism of the peasants, 
the lack of traditions — whether inspiring or confin- 
ing — that might guide and balance in the building of 
a free political structure, render one doubtful in ap- 
plying any parallel from the revolutions of the western 
peoples. It was perhaps inevitable that Russia should 
face the colossal problem of social and economic recon- 
struction before political liberty was assured and while 
the Prussian invaders were burning and slaughtering 
within a few days' march of Petrograd. Russia is 
nothing if not unpractical. Yet it is one of the most 



RUSSIAN REVOLUTION 1 39 

amazing and most pathetic spectacles of history to see 
a Mary among the nations, to adopt Stephen Graham's 
parallel, 1 facing a task that might well daunt the most 
capable and efficient of Marthas. When we doubt the 
ultimate success of socialism in Russia it is not because 
we are condemning socialism itself; it is because a 
people so far conspicuously lacking in the gift of prac- 
tical organization should attempt the most tremendous 
task of social reconstruction ever attempted since the 
world began. 

Yet we of the more practical west may stand in 
amazement, perhaps, but in some reverence too before 
a people who have dreams that they willingly die for, 
whose idealism may fall away from unworthy leaders 
but may be trusted to flame again in its never ending 
passion for final truth, for divine perfection — an 
idealism infinitely less practical than that of clear- 
thinking France or of scientific, well-disciplined Ger- 
many. It is the naive and childlike faith of Russia, 
the impossible simplicity of Ivan Durak, " to the Jews 
a stumbling block and to the Gentiles foolishness/' 
that confounds us and makes us hesitate to apply our 
ordinary standards of judgment. 

After all the essential fact is that Russia is awaken- 
ing. Even the humblest peasant prizes his newly won 

1 Graham, The Way of Martha and the Way of Mary (New 
York, 1 9 17). 



140 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

and still insecure freedom, little as he cares what gov- 
ernment holds sway at Moscow or Petrograd. And 
if Russia is still bewildered, easily deceived, prone to 
trust others, yet the Slavic apathy is breaking, and the 
wings of her idealism may carry her to heights beyond 
the power of our firmer, more cautious climbing. The 
supreme prophet of Russia may have uttered the alle- 
gory of his people in words that he applied to himself : 
" There are men with powerful wings whom pleasure 
leads to alight in the midst of the crowd, when their 
wings are broken; such, for instance, am I. Then 
they beat their broken wings ; they launch themselves 
desperately, but fall again. The wings will mend. I 
shall fly high. May God help me!" 1 So with Rus- 
sia. The wings will mend. She will fly high. May 
God help her ! 

iTolstoy's Journal, October 28, 1879. Quoted in Romain Rol- 
land, Tolstoy, pp. 306-307 (New York, 1911). 



VIII 

British Liberty and the Empire 

Of all the countries of Europe England is appar- 
ently least in need of radical reconstruction. It has 
become a truism to say that her history is the history 
not of sudden and dramatic changes but of slow and 
cautious advance. The foundations of her political 
structure are so deeply and firmly laid in the experience 
of a thousand years that no shock seems likely now to 
overthrow it. But Britain's political stability does not 
mean political rigidity, nor does it involve freedom 
from national problems of the first magnitude. The 
impression that we have of a certain security and pla- 
cidity in England is partly a just one ; the solidity and 
elasticity of her governmental organization, the ease 
and steadiness with which her constitution has met 
every shock, developing by constant readjustment, both 
reflect and react upon the British character. But the 
words solidity, elasticity, readjustment are used ad- 
visedly. If solidity is our first impression elasticity is 
the second. It is not quite true that there have been 
no revolutions in English history, nor is it certain that 

141 



I42 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

there will be none in the future. The instructive thing 
is not the absence of dramatic moments and of crises 
but their character and their outcome. And the study 
of these crises in the past is the surest way in which to 
see both the basis on which British liberty rests and 
the way in which present and future problems both of 
freedom and of empire are likely to be met. 

Let us take our stand first at the period of the Amer- 
ican Revolution. " The body of this people," wrote 
Benjamin Franklin of the English in 1769, " is of a 
noble and generous nature, loving and honoring the 
spirit of liberty, and hating arbitrary power of all 
sorts." The observation was a true one, and this spirit 
of liberty, this hatred of arbitrary power was based on 
specific and definite facts. Actual liberty is always a 
matter of compromise; in the freest lands of the twen- 
tieth century there are miscarriages of justice, re- 
straints of freedom; but in the main it is true that in 
eighteenth century England arbitrary imprisonment, 
arbitrary taxation and arbitrary legislation were things 
of the past. Moreover the government was directly 
and absolutely responsible to Parliament, and the 
dominant House of Parliament, the Commons, in 
theory at least represented the English people. Much 
remained to be done, assuredly, before England could 
be called a democracy, but much had been achieved. 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE I43 

And it had been achieved by definite steps in a slow but 
unbroken progress. 

The traditions of English liberty went back to Alfred 
the Great; back indeed to the unrecorded ages before 
the English came to Kent. George Washington and 
William Pitt alike could look back to the ancient cus- 
tom by which every township was governed by its town 
meeting, by which every hundred was governed by its 
assembly of delegates from the towns, and by which 
every county was governed by its folk-moot, a repre- 
sentative council made up of elected deputies from the 
towns and hundreds. The national council of Saxon 
England was indeed an assembly of nobles, but in every 
shire the machinery of self-government and much of 
its spirit remained intact from the half -mythical age 
of Hengist and Horsa to the time of Edward the Con- 
fessor. English liberty was not always actual in those 
days but it was a vital and stubbornly held tradition, 
and a tradition partly expressed in law and fact. 

Then came the Norman Conquest. Like all mili- 
tary conquests it had its brutal side, meant shock and 
violent readjustment. But it consolidated England 
nevertheless, and by virtue of the clearer issue between 
foreign kings and barons on the one hand and the peo- 
ple on the other it led to a crystallizing of the old tra- 
dition of freedom. The vague notions of liberty were 



144 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

expressed in the desire for a re-affirming of the laws 
and customs of Edward the Confessor, and this was 
conceded by the Norman kings — not unwilling to se- 
cure the grateful loyalty of the English as a check to 
the lawless pride of the wolves in armor who regarded 
the land as booty and the king as little more than the 
leader of the pack. 

But freedom of person, security of property, and the 
exercise of even a small degree of local self-government 
were held by a slender and insecure tenure. The obvi- 
ous need was for some definite progress toward protec- 
tion from arbitrary power and a real share in the gov- 
ernment. The former was gained when the Great 
Charter was signed in 1215 ; the latter when Simon de 
Montfort summoned a House of Commons in 1265 
and more permanently when Edward I called repre- 
sentatives of the towns to sit beside the barons in the 
Parliament of 1295. These gains were far from final, 
but they represent a long step forward nevertheless. 
The Charter gave England a standard and a definition 
of liberty that was never wholly forgotten; and the 
representation of the towns in the national assembly 
was the beginning of the progress that was to lead in 
time to the democracy of the twentieth century. There 
still remained the confirming, the solid establishing of 
these " rights of Englishmen," the securing for the 
House of Commons of not merely a share in govern- 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE 145 

ment but control, and the making of Parliament the 
true voice of all England. 

The attainment of the first of these was safely deter- 
mined by the Revolution of the seventeenth century. 
It was four hundred years after Magna Carta before 
the English towns were ready to assert with confidence 
and conviction their right to the only possible secure 
foundation for personal liberty — a controlling share 
in government. The feudal lords had been long since 
shorn of all their powers except those still held by the 
House of Lords. The seventeenth century conflict 
was not with the nobles but with the Stuart kings 
and their assertion of a right to govern independently 
of the nation's will. The result was decisive. After 
1688 the Parliament governed England; in Parliament 
the House of Commons was the controlling partner; 
there was no taxation or legislation without the con- 
sent of the national assembly, no imprisonment or pun- 
ishment without fair trial before judge and jury. 

One further step was needed to make the Revolu- 
tion complete, and it was taken before the century of 
Hampden and Cromwell came to an end. This was 
the definite determination of the responsibility of the 
king's ministers to Parliament, the creation of what 
is known now as the Cabinet system. Thereafter the 
king, according to his personal qualities, might be an 
influence but ceased to have any direct power. His 



I46 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

ministers were practically a committee of Parliament. 
The loss of the confidence and support of the House 
of Commons meant the resignation of the entire cabi- 
net, its reconstruction or replacement. It might be 
possible indeed for kings or statesmen to thwart the 
will of the nation by manipulation, by schemes analo- 
gous to the shifty devices of the modern " boss." And 
this was a very real danger, illustrated only too well in 
the period from the accession of George III to the 
treaty that acknowledged the independence of the 
American colonies. But this is a danger against which 
even democracy is not secure, a danger not acute so far 
as kingly power is concerned since 1783 but far from 
removed even yet in its other aspects, removable in- 
deed only by the growth of popular intelligence and 
initiative. Recognizing this, the fact remains that the 
perfecting of the cabinet system of responsible govern- 
ment made the House of Commons the ruling power in 
England. 

So that when Franklin spoke of the English loving 
the spirit of liberty and hating arbitrary power he was 
thinking of a tradition and a fact whose origin could 
be seen a thousand years in the past, which had been 
steadily developed until personal liberty and a large 
measure of self-government had been attained and the 
arbitrary power of the king buried beyond any hope 
of resurrection. But Parliament was not yet the voice 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE I47 

of the nation. The English people had yet to make 
their national body truly representative. And closely 
associated with this next step forward was the need not 
only for radical institutional reforms but for a more 
thorough spiritual and practical adjustment of the peo- 
ple to their growing responsibilities, a progressive es- 
cape from narrow insularity, a more perfect reflection 
in the government of the steadily developing national 
idealism and national conscience. 

For the government of England in the eighteenth 
century was government by a small group ; it was not 
truly national in any organic sense ; it might be directed 
well or ill, with regard to national aims and ideals or 
with regard to the interests of a class or an individual; 
it might be guided by a Chatham or a Newcastle, might 
bring the country great glory or profound humiliation 
according to the accident of the ruling personality in 
the administration. That is to say, it had the merits 
and the defects of an oligarchy. And if it is true that 
the basis of the government had to be widened it is also 
true that the nation itself had much to learn before it 
could wisely undertake the responsibility of selecting 
and judging its rulers. The problem of the future was 
then threefold — the nationalizing of Parliament, the 
reform of the entire machinery of government to adapt 
its working to changing national standards, and the po- 
litical education of the nation as a whole. 



I48 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

The first of these was solved by a series of reform- 
ing measures that began with the Reform Bill of 1832 
and closed with the franchise act of March, 191 8. So 
far as human devices can accomplish it the government 
of England is now the expression of the English people. 
The whole matter was carried through with character- 
istic caution and with characteristic refusal to base the 
extension of the suffrage on any general principle of 
universal right. There was no recognition of any ab- 
stract and inborn right to vote, and if any reformer had 
proposed such a recognition in 1832 or in the debates 
on Disraeli's Reform Bill of 1867 or Gladstone's Bill 
of 1884 ^ would have been unanimously voted down. 
Each step forward was taken on its own merits, the 
vote being granted on the basis of ability to use it with 
intelligence and responsibility. And the very slowness 
of the advance, with its discussions and agitations, 
aided in the matter of national education in govern- 
ment. The result is that notwithstanding its mo- 
narchical form and its House of Lords England is to 
all intents and purposes a democracy. 

Of the whole complex process of administrative re- 
form and the growth of political intelligence we need 
notice only the general trend. The essential thing to 
remember is that British liberty and British conception 
of social order, like the Empire, have been unplanned, 
unsystematic, unsymmetrical in their growth, not pro- 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE I49 

ceeding on logical or consistent principles but moving 
sometimes rapidly and sometimes slowly, removing one 
abuse and leaving another untouched for a generation, 
the light coming not like the dawn, diffused and uni- 
versal, but in brilliant rays that illumine a narrow circle 
and leave vast areas in darkness. We grow in the 
same way as individuals, developing wonderful skill in 
some things, remaining clumsy and inept in others, 
growing in wisdom and in stupidity, in virtue and in 
weakness, threading our way through a wilderness with 
patience and courage, to stumble and lose ourselves on 
the well-lit highway. But progress has not been wholly 
haphazard and blundering; with the erratic gleams 
there has been the slow advance of a real daybreak; 
and there has been an increasing willingness to throw 
down barriers, to let freedom of speech, freedom of 
thought, the mighty educative forces of the press and 
of unhampered intercourse aid in the oncoming and 
penetration of the light. There has been even an effort 
to remove economic burdens, to recognize the need for 
mutual help, a realization that education and reform 
proceed as much by the dissolving of prejudices, by the 
following of generous impulses, by resolute courage in 
magnanimity as by the acquiring of knowledge or by 
external changes. 

We do not use the word education in the technical 
and institutional sense. Public education through the 



150 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

schools has indeed been systematized and democratized 
only in our own time by the Education Bill of 19 18 — 
one of the cases in which an obvious and inevitable re- 
form was postponed by class, academic, and ecclesiasti- 
cal opposition. But the admirable measure that has 
been at last enacted is the formal and institutional 
result of a widening of horizon, a growth of intellectual 
and spiritual life that altered the outlook and deepened 
the humanity of the English people long before it found 
expression and satisfaction in law and machinery. Its 
pioneers were men like Carlyle, Ruskin, Morris, the 
Arnolds, and Kingsley, and the result may be seen in 
the whole tone of novels and periodicals from Dickens 
to Galsworthy, in the immense vitality of the Labor 
Unions, in the iconoclastic writings of H. G. Wells, 
George Bernard Shaw and G. K. Chesterton, in the 
" socialistic " legislation of Lloyd-George. One is not 
bound to approve every manifestation of the new life. 
But it is of profound importance to recognize that the 
wide reaching forces of an education infinitely more 
potent than any activities of the class-room have 
brought forth activities, purposes, eager and insistent 
quests that are already reconstructing the whole fabric 
of English thought and conduct. Libertv is no longer 
a matter of votes and institutional reforms. The 
negative and destructive phase, absolutely necessary 
and fruitful as it was, has given way progressively to a 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE 151 

phase that is constructive and positive, and the English 
people are setting forth on voyages of discovery as 
adventurous and as momentous as those of Frobisher 
and Drake. 

One element in this movement of national education 
for democracy is the Empire. It is not without reason 
that observers have said that British history in the last 
hundred years has been centered chiefly in two things 
— democracy and expansion, each unceasingly react- 
ing on the other. And impossible as it is to discuss 
in any detail the infinitely difficult and complicated 
problems of the British Empire it is by no means im- 
possible to indicate the most essential facts that have 
bearing on broad principles of policy. 

The nucleus of the Empire is England. But the 
moment we widen our field of study to consider the 
Empire we find that we have to correct our terminol- 
ogy. To use the words England and Britain as if 
they were synonymous is not strictly accurate when 
we are referring to the last two hundred years. For 
England is only the most powerful and populous mem- 
ber of a partnership in which her three associates — 
Wales, Scotland and Ireland — are far from being 
dormant or submerged. 1 We say partnership, not 

1 In round numbers England has a population of about 
35,000,000, Wales of about 2,000,000, Scotland of 4,700,000 and 
Ireland of 4,400,000. 



152 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

federation, for the four peoples are combined in a leg- 
islative and administrative union. None of the four 
have separate autonomy. All send representatives on 
equal terms to the Parliament at Westminster, and all 
are subject to a common administration responsible to 
that Parliament. If each of the four voted en bloc 
on the basis of representation in proportion to popu- 
lation, England would naturally have an overwhelming 
preponderance over the other three. But this is never 
done. The Parliamentary divisions are based not on 
national affiliations but on party groupings, and if 
either Scotch or Irish representatives choose to vote 
as such they could frequently hold the balance of 
power. 

Of the four nations thus united Ireland is over- 
represented, with 103 members to Scotland's J2. But 
Ireland is the one discontented member of the Union, 
and Ireland presents accordingly the nearest and most 
pressing of imperial problems ; she is the one member 
of the Empire in which there is an active and powerful 
movement for secession. The Irish question is of 
course not a new one; it has been one of the most 
baffling and anxious problems that England has had to 
face since she first began to take her empire seriously, 
and bit by bit she has believed that she was in a fair 
way to solve it. But in the last few years it has en- 
tered on a new and acute phase. In any attempt at 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE 1 53 

imperial reconstruction Ireland's three partners — not 
England alone — will have to try once more to cross 
the abyss that separates the Irish attitude to life from 
the English or the Scottish and attempt to devise some 
workable basis on which the two islands may be peace- 
ful and friendly neighbors. Here again it is not our 
province to make even a suggestion toward a solution 
of the puzzle. We can only state the facts that give 
us a starting point. And as a beginning we ask to 
be granted two postulates — one that England's rec- 
ord in Ireland up to the first quarter of the nineteenth 
century was consistently one of tyranny and misrule, 
and a second, that in recent years she has shown will- 
ingness to go to any length in the healing of the old 
wounds. Democratic England, in other words, has 
been endeavoring to cancel the misdeeds of oligarchic 
England. 

The desires of Ireland a century ago were three- 
fold — the removal of religious disabilities, the just 
settlement of a peculiarly oppressive system of land 
tenure, and autonomy or Home Rule. The first was 
granted by the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 
and the disestablishment of the Protestant Church of 
Ireland in 1869. The second was dealt with in a 
series of Land Purchase Acts culminating in Wynd- 
ham's Act of 1903, by which the Irish tenants were 
aided in the purchase of their lands by payments no 



154 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

more burdensome than the old rent. Two-thirds of 
the Irish agriculturists now own their own land, and 
the Irish Land Question which provoked so much 
heartburning and bitterness two generations ago exists 
no longer. Home Rule was a more difficult matter. 
Gladstone's two Home Rule Bills of 1886 and 1893 
wrecked his own power and split the Liberal Party. 
But at last the Bill introduced by Mr. Asquith in 19 12 
and passed in 19 14 gave England's consent to Home 
Rule on the understanding that it was not to come into 
effect until after the war. 

This condition was agreed upon because every one 
knew that the enactment of Home Rule by the British 
Parliament was far from settling the question. Six 
of the nine counties of Ulster were bitterly opposed to 
the idea of an Irish Parliament at Dublin — an- 
nounced indeed that they would oppose it, so far as 
application to Ulster was concerned, by armed resist- 
ance. It was thought possible that some kind of fed- 
erative scheme might be arranged, but the intensity of 
Irish sectional feeling promised so fierce a dispute 
over details that it seemed unwise to attempt a settle- 
ment during the war. Then long before the war 
closed arose a new dragon in the path — Sinn Fein. 
When November, 19 18, brought peace, and when the 
triumphant but wearied Britons began to consider the 
fulfillment of the promise of 19 14 they found that the 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE 1 55 

whole problem had changed its aspect. Ulster still 
stood on the platform of 19 12-14. But the majority 
of the people who had agitated and suffered so long 
for Home Rule and had at last won England's sup- 
port, now cast their old banners aside and demanded 
independence. 

Part of the situation is clear; part of it is distress- 
ingly obscure. Only by an extravagant and mislead- 
ing figure of speech can Ireland be pictured as in 
chains. She is in chains only as South Carolina and 
Virginia were in chains in i860 — not so much so 
indeed, for the South did fear from the Union an act 
that was regarded as unjust, the expropriation of 
property and the annihilation of a valued institution. 
Ireland is in no danger of anything of the kind. Her 
champions do indeed speak of oppression and slavery, 
but the words have only a symbolical meaning: the 
oppression lies solely in the insistence on the main- 
tenance of Union. But even if the principle of self- 
determination and the rights of small nationalities 
were to lead England to grant Ireland her independ- 
ence — notwithstanding a danger to her national 
safety far graver than the danger of the Napoleon- 
Maximilian combination in Mexico or the danger of 
an independent southern Confederacy ever were to 
the United States — there still remains Ulster. Ul- 
ster as part of an Irish republic would be an Irish 



156 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

Alsace-Lorraine, an Irish Poland, forced to become 
part of a state with which it has little in common ex- 
cept location on the same island. England might con- 
ceivably grant independence to Ireland. She could 
not possibly look on at the coercion of Ulster. 

December 27, 19 18, saw Ireland swept by Sinn 
Fein. 1 Seventy-two members were elected to repre- 
sent Irish constituencies in the British Parliament on 
the understanding that they would not go to Westmin- 
ster but would instead meet as the first Parliament of 
the Irish Republic. The astonished world has seen 
this carried out, has read the Irish Declaration of In- 
dependence, has heard how the proceedings were car- 
ried on not in English but in the language of the older 
Ireland. An Irish Parliament at Dublin demanding 
the withdrawal of the " British garrison " ; Ulster 
grimly watching, rifles in hand; England waiting, 
wrathful and exasperated, sick of war, loathing the 
idea of coercion, uncertain whether the proceedings of 
January, 19 19, were a pageant or a tragedy; the world 
at large apparently disinclined to take the whole busi- 
ness seriously and less interested in the erratic doings 
of the Irish than in the growing strength of the Labor 
Party — such is the situation now. The conflict is 

1 An interesting and sympathetic account of Sinn Fein and the 
movement of which it is an outcome will be found in Morris, 
The Celtic Dawn (Macmillan, New York, 1917). 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE 1 57 

no doubt largely one of religion; it is at least partly 
economic; but it is nine-tenths based on memory and 
sentiment, and against these intangible but tremen- 
dous forces argument and persuasion are of little 
avail. 

But Ireland is after all a singular and exceptional 
case; the future of the Empire will depend primarily 
on the wisdom or unwisdom shown in relation to the 
overseas dominions. And here we must again put 
forward a postulate, though in truth it is a simple 
historical fact rather than a postulate. It is this, that 
the British Empire was in no sense the result of a 
clearly understood imperial policy. It was not 
planned by statesmen and was neither acquired nor 
at any time governed according to a consistent theory 
or method. Canada was conquered as a result of an 
apparently irreconcilable conflict between two rivals 
in North America, one feudal in form, absolutist and 
militarist in spirit, the other free, highly individual- 
istic, restless and intolerant of restraint. It was a 
rivalry of two peoples, not of kings or governments, 
and the victors were not thinking so much of empire 
as of the right to live and grow in their own way. 
Australia was discovered almost by accident, colonized 
as a penal settlement, and raised to its present status 
as a Commonwealth by colonists who went to the 
south Pacific of their own will, seeking a home and a 



I58 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

larger opportunity than was open to them in the British 
islands. India was conquered by the East India Com- 
pany, not by England, slowly, reluctantly, against spe- 
cific orders from the Directors at home, as a police 
measure; and the Indian princes who were conquered 
were themselves foreign invaders ruling a subject peo- 
ple by the power of the sword. Princes and traders 
represented principles of ethics and life that could not 
possibly exist side by side. The conquest of India 
was not foreseen and not designed; it was simply one 
of the irrepressible conflicts of history. And these 
illustrations are quite typical. The Empire grew; it 
was not constructed. Or if it was in a sense con- 
structed the builders were traders, missionaries, ad- 
venturers, home seekers, not — for the most part — 
statesmen or soldiers. An imperialist policy arose 
only after the Empire was already a fact. 1 

But this spontaneous, unplanned growth of the Brit- 
ish Empire led to a singular failure to develop any 
consistent policy of control. The measures adopted 
to meet a situation in one part of the world might 
be exactly opposite in principle to a measure applied 
somewhere else. No British statesman, except per- 
haps Chatham, ever seriously viewed the Empire as 
a whole or systematically considered either further 

1 See Lavell and Payne, Imperial England (Macmillan, New 
York, 1918). 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE 1 59 

conquests or the organization of dominions already 
conquered. Each problem was met as it arose by the 
men on the spot, sanctioned or canceled after the fact 
by the administration at home, never faced as part 
of a whole. If we may be permitted a paradox, it 
came to be almost a policy to have no policy, but to 
adopt without formulation an ideal, the ideal of Brit- 
ish liberty, the practical freedom that respects the free- 
dom of others. So that the Empire, conquered without 
plan, remained heterogeneous in character and govern- 
ment. And therein lay its salvation. The myriad 
peoples under the British flag were never squeezed into 
a British mold, never made to conform to the British 
pattern, except in one regard: they must not kill or 
otherwise interfere with others, and they must be 
reasonably honest. They could agitate, complain, 
criticize, say or print all kinds of sedition, but they 
must keep the law. 

The result was a startling one. Instead of a co- 
herent and efficient imperial administration there was 
born in the British dominions a real spirit of imperial 
nationality. Every colonist, every subject who really 
thought at all, began in the second half of the nine- 
teenth century to realize that he was part of a living 
thing, of a nation unorganized and formless but a 
nation nevertheless. Some of the colonies had been 
granted self-government, were practically independent, 



160 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

retaining the British flag and the British name with 
willing affection and pride but with no sense of sub- 
jection. They kept the phrase " British subject " 
from old habit; but no king or statesman of the mother 
country dreamed of making the Canadian or the Aus- 
tralian a subject in actual fact. The peoples of India, 
on the other hand, were really subject to the British 
Parliament. But this status came to be regarded as 
a temporary concession to difficult and complicated 
facts, not as anything permanent or inevitable. Every 
effort indeed was put forth to educate Bengalese and 
Rajputs, Sikhs and Mohammedans in habits of politi- 
cal thinking, political self-restraint, and political initia- 
tive. There might be disagreement as to immediate 
concessions and as to this or that procedure; Hindus 
and English might not see eye to eye as to the grant- 
ing of autonomy this year or next; but the whole pol- 
icy of Britain's rule in India loses sense and coherence 
if that rule is to be regarded as a fixed and absolute 
thing. 

Once more comes in the English refusal to pay 
much attention to rigid general principles, even those 
of democracy and self-determination. The Briton 
knows that government is a difficult matter and a very 
practical one. He gained his own liberty in a thou- 
sand years of training; he values it and is willing to 
help others to attain it; but if he sees disaster as a 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE l6l 

likely result of freedom he makes up his mind that 
whether he can work out a logical justification or not 
freedom must temporarily give way to safety. It 
is not a question of sacrifice of principles. It is a 
question of good sense. If we were to sum up 
England's attitude to even the noblest and truest gen- 
eralizations about things human and social it would 
be something like this : that human nature is too com- 
plex and variable to be reduced to a formula or an 
exact science, that the statesman like the sailor has 
frequently to pursue a devious course to avoid shoals, 
and that to shipwreck the state by heading rigidly and 
consistently toward your goal is poor seamanship. 
Treason to an ideal does not lie in a temporary change 
of course but in a change that is permanent and con- 
scious. And it is the Empire's confidence in Britain's 
fundamental loyalty to freedom and fair play that 
must account for the astonishing solidarity of 19 14-8. 
Take India, for example. Here is a land of 1,800,- 
000 square miles and 300,000,000 people, varying in 
intellectual and spiritual power from Rabindranath 
Tagore to Gonds and Pathans on the cultural level of 
the Zulu. In her varieties of race, of religion, of tra- 
dition India is not a nation but a continent whose peo- 
ples are less a unit than the peoples of Europe. Ben- 
galees, Sikhs, Mohammedans and Bhils are infinitely 
less alike than Serbs, Portuguese, Bavarians and Gas- 



1 62 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

cons. Until the British conquest they had never 
known the smallest degree of political freedom or more 
than an external and deceptive unity. To have kept 
them disunited and permanently subject by the meth- 
ods of Moguls and Sultans would have been a simple 
matter. But instead of doing this or even attempting 
it the English have founded schools and universities, 
have encouraged the establishment of a vernacular 
press, have given the cities self-government, have ad- 
mitted natives to high places in the civil and military 
service, have organized representative Councils for 
the separate provinces and for the Empire, have in 
every way sought to awaken that which the despot 
does all in his power to suppress — the intelligence 
and initiative of the people. Mistakes have been 
made. Tyrannical and repressive acts have been com- 
mitted by ignorant or narrow-minded Parliaments and 
officials. But these do not in the least obscure the 
essential fact that England has been fundamentally true 
to the ideals and principles clarified and worked out in 
the home island from the days of Northumbria and 
Wessex to the days of Gladstone and Lloyd-George. 
And the result has been the growth of what is ex- 
ternally the strangest kind of patriotism that the 
world has ever seen, not based on community of race 
or language or culture but on community of sentiment 
and aim. 



BRITISH LIBERTY AND THE EMPIRE 1 63 

The problems of reconstruction so far as liberty and 
the Empire are concerned do not involve, then, any 
important change of goal or of general method. They 
are largely a matter of external form, the removal of 
inconsistencies, 1 the improvement of legal and admin- 
istrative machinery, the devising of some method by 
which the overseas dominions may be given a voice in 
imperial concerns. The time is even in sight when 
Britain will have to consider the matter of social and 
economic reconstruction from the point of view laid 
down in the platform of the Labor Party : " to insure 
the most equitable distribution of the nation's wealth 
that may be possible, on the basis of the common own- 
ership of land and capital and the democratic control 
of all the activities of society." But whatever may be 
the outcome, and however the immediate problems 
may be settled the basis of reconstruction is clear. It 
lies not in a formula, a law or an institution but in a 
record. British liberty may take new forms, as it has 
in the past, but it cannot be destroyed, for it is inter- 
woven in the very fiber of the British people. It may 
be inconsistent in its application and may wander from 
the path, for it is not an absolute or invariable thing, 

1 It need hardly be pointed out that these are innumerable. 
Many of them are comparatively unimportant, but some — such 
as what is left of the old secret and not too scrupulous diplomacy 
— must naturally hamper the free expression of national life in 
its government. 



164 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

but it cannot wander far or forever. And the Em- 
pire, whatever outward forms it may take, is irrevo- 
cably a living federation of free peoples. Reconstruc- 
tion may give liberty and the Empire more coherent 
and adequate form. But that form must not too 
tightly enclose the life that it expresses or it will fol- 
low divine right and the Whig oligarchy into the scrap 
heap of discarded machinery. 



IX 

The New Idealism in England 

To the average American England is the conserva- 
tive, stubborn John Bull, admirable in a certain inflex- 
ible doggedness, not so admirable in the matters of 
stiffness, unyielding prejudices, insularity and arro- 
gance. Even those who know the poetry of Shelley 
and Keats, or the paintings of Turner and Burne- 
Jones frequently and perhaps unconsciously take as 
their normal type of Englishman the well-fed person 
of florid countenance, bull-dog jaw and truculent ex- 
pression with whom the cartoonists of many gener- 
ations have made us familiar. Associated with this 
individual in the American mind there is an unpleas- 
ant memory of George III and Lord North, and of 
hostile gestures during the Civil War. And the whole 
combination has kept alive in many minds a feeling 
that has ceased, indeed, to be unfriendly but is hardly 
one of active affection. Since the early years of the 
war a warmer feeling has been noticeable, inspired 
both by admiration and by recognition that England's 
traditional tenacity was in this case at least a real bul- 

165 



1 66 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

wark of civilization. But the change, one fears, while 
welcome and of incalculable value for the future, is 
rather emotional than rational, and curiously enough 
England is still to Americans at once the best known 
and the least understood of all the states of Europe. 
The English people are still under the shadow of the 
John Bull cartoons and the memory of unhappy epi- 
sodes of the past. 

The quality of tenacity, the " courage never to sub- 
mit or yield," the quality that has made the bull-dog 
a much more appropriate symbol of the English race 
than the lion, is indeed recognizable as English, and 
tenacity in its less attractive aspects does no doubt 
tend to become obstinacy. But the typical English- 
man, tenacious and even obstinate as he may be, is cer- 
tainly not a John Bull. John Bull was, in fact, the 
Tory squire of a hundred years ago, a picturesque 
and compelling figure, indeed, of no small power in 
past politics, but in no sense representative of all Eng- 
lishmen. If, however, instead of limiting our view to 
one class, we try to see whether we can venture on any 
general proposition regarding the English people, we 
might perhaps dare to say this — that the English are 
singularly practical in both a good and a bad sense, 
excelling in the cool, sensible and fearless meeting of 
problems as they come, but not largely gifted with 
foresight and imagination, content to face an immedi- 



THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND 167 

ate difficulty and to solve it with great patience and 
thoroughness, but little inclined to theorize, to look 
beyond a concrete situation to principles and ideals. 
This practical tendency — in which Americans are, 
after all, very like their kinsmen overseas — has its 
unfortunate side, and has often degenerated into ma- 
terialism. It is in this regard that the Saxon is often 
contrasted with the Celt, and the Welsh, Scottish and 
Irish elements pointed to as redeeming strains in the 
British stock. Yet even of the English themselves 
our statement can be made only with reservations. It 
may be questioned whether the hard-headed, somewhat 
cold-hearted, brutally practical Englishman was ever a 
universal type; there were always Chaucers, Shake- 
speres, Miltons, Lambs and Cowpers; and time and 
again the English imperviousnes to ideas and ideals 
has been broken by the surging of noble enthusiasms 
and of imaginative power. All we can admit is a 
tendency, a tendency sometimes strongly marked and 
sometimes hardly visible — a tendency to which Mat- 
thew Arnold gave the name of Philistinism, the oppo- 
site of idealism. This much is probably true, that 
Philistinism has been in the past — in spite of brilliant 
exceptions — the outstanding national fault of Eng- 
land, a sort of spiritual bondage to the practical. 

Now it is precisely this bondage that has been grad- 
ually broken during the last century and a half. Eng- 



1 68 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

land has passed through a spiritual revolution. It is 
true that in most of the essentials of character and 
attitude to life the English of the present are still the 
English of Cromwell's day or of Shakespere's. The 
love of action and the virtues of action that made 
England's greatest poet a dramatist, the shrewd cau- 
tion that requires progress to go by one step at a 
time — with tangible evidence that the new foothold 
is solid — the patience in untying troublesome knots 
and the common-sense in cutting knots that refuse to 
be untied, the dislike of extremes and the love of 
compromise, all of these characteristics run through 
century after century of English history. They are 
still present, and they show no signs of disappearing. 
But to them has been added a new idealism 1 that has 
widened the Englishman's horizon and deepened his 
insight. The old complacent arrogance, the old insu- 
larity are visibly fading away. And this change is 
perhaps a more enthralling and significant phase of 
modern English history than even the creation of the 
empire or the achievement of democracy, closely asso- 
ciated as these all are. It has been wonderfully evi- 
dent during the war, and it must be given full weight 
in our estimate of England's part in reconstruction. 

1 See pp. 72-3. By idealism in relation to England is meant 
simply willingness and power to look beyond the concrete pres- 
ent, to see in life spiritual realities as well as material things. 



THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND 1 69 

Let us be specific, for the story of this spiritual 
change is just as definite, just as clearly marked in its 
incidents, as the story of a war or of a political revo- 
lution. Look first at the field most accessible and in 
some ways most conclusive — the field of literature. 
Every student of English poetry knows the character- 
istics of, say, Dryden and Pope. One finds in them 
penetrating knowledge of human nature, keen good 
sense, a wonderful gift of clear, vivid, striking, often 
epigrammatic expression, and a sounding, immedi- 
ately apprehended rhythm — a music of verse as easily 
caught as the music of Sousa's marches. Their de- 
fect is in depth and breadth of vision, in the quality 
and power of the music. They are hard, external, 
unemotional, lacking in prophetic insight. All in them 
except their music could be expressed in prose, and 
their music — effective as it often is — rarely lifts our 
souls much above the prosaic, practical contemplation 
of the world around us. 

Now turn from, say, Pope's Essay on Man to Shel- 
ley's Ode to a Skylark or to any of the lyrics of Keats. 
Pope and Shelley are separated in time by only a 
hundred years. Yet they belong to different worlds. 
Shelley is not concerned at all with the concrete world 
around him. He resents it and seeks to escape from 
it. Practical common sense is to him the common 
sense of crawling when God has given us wings, gaz- 



I70 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

ing at the earth beneath when the glories of Heaven 
are displayed above us, shutting ourselves up in a cell 
and busying ourselves with its walls and bars and un- 
lovely furniture when outside we may revel in divine 
beauty and the immeasurable joy of spiritual freedom. 
He chafes against human limitations. Life is to him 
not a practical thing but a sad thing because it is so 
full of chains and blindness. So he is a poet not of 
shrewd common-sense but of revolt, of escape, of infi- 
nite yearning for a life freed from the sordid, prosaic, 
every-day concreteness of a practical but weary and 
unprofitable world. And his verse has a magic and 
power in its music that Pope never dreamed of; to 
compare Pope and Shelley is like comparing Strauss 
with Beethoven. 

In other words the contrast between Pope and Shel- 
ley is the contrast between the self-satisfied, sensible 
man of the world and the man who has discovered that 
the gates of Heaven are before us, ready to open when 
we have the courage and the strength to utter the 
" Open Sesame " that will reveal to us the dazzling 
light and beauty of eternal truth. In a famous para- 
ble of twenty-three centuries ago Plato compared him- 
self and his fellows to men living in a cavern, who 
knew nothing of the outer world except through shad- 
ows cast on the wall, who had never seen the sun and 
were content with the dim light of their cave. Let 



THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND I7I 

one of them be taken out into the splendor of daylight 
— he will be dazzled and blinded, anxious to flee back 
into the comfortable darkness. To these cave-men 
common-sense means living comfortably in their twi- 
light, discussing their shadows, talking about the walls 
and the roof and one another, pouring scorn on the 
dreamers who talk of possible sunlight, space and 
beauty outside. Now Pope and the English people of 
his time were sensible, practical, capable men of the 
cavern : Shelley had caught a glimpse of the light and 
glory beyond the entrance. He did not quite know 
how to escape or what to do when he did escape. 
But he was quite sure that the life of the cave was a 
contemptible affair, and that to leave it — even by- 
breaking down the walls — was the first duty of man. 
And Shelley was not the only prophet of the new 
idealism in literature. Long before his time one may 
see in English poetry a new motive, the same in essence 
as was expressed so powerfully by the whole " back to 
nature " movement in France. Among both peoples 
there was arising a feeling that life had become too 
hard, too complex and artificial, that civilization was 
becoming a curse rather than a blessing, and that the 
cure for human ills was in a return to nature, to the 
simple life. In its political and social aspects the new 
idea was expressed in the American Declaration of In- 
dependence : " all men are created equal and are en- 



172 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

dowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights"; 
and on this side the movement was a protest against 
the irrational tyrannies and social inequalities of the 
eighteenth century. Fifteen years before the Declara- 
tion of Independence it had found powerful expres- 
sion in the Social Contract and the Emile, and in time 
to come it was to sweep over Europe in the war-cry 
of liberty, equality and fraternity. But in England 
the revolt against artificiality and the praise of nature 
had little influence on politics. It did indeed touch 
economics, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations 
(1776) was a powerful presentation of the principle of 
economic freedom, the first shot in the campaign that 
ultimately led England to abolish commercial and in- 
dustrial restrictions and adopt free trade. But if the 
new faith in nature did not find expression in govern- 
ment it did influence most powerfully the thought and 
feelings of the people. One may see it stirring in 
Cowper's Task and in Thomson's Seasons. And 
finally it found its prophet in Wordsworth. We shall 
not comment on Wordsworth's religion of nature be- 
cause it can be understood best if we read his poetry. 
But if we give a single hour to the Lines written above 
Tint em Abbey we may see how the door of the Eng- 
lish mind was being opened to a new world of truth 
and beauty. 1 Shelley was a poet of revolt and yearn- 

1 The student who wishes to know more of Wordsworth is 



THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND 1 73 

ing; but Wordsworth was a poet of discovery; his 
Heaven was found all around him, God's universe. 

This note of rebellion against artifkialism and of 
nature worship was only one sign of the change that 
was coming over England. The eighteenth century 
saw the birth of English painting. And it began in a 
characteristic way with the brutal realism of David 
Hogarth. Before Hogarth there were no English 
painters, and when foreign artists came to England — 
Holbein and Van Dyck, for instance — the only works 
that the islanders wanted of them were portraits. 
Portraits one could understand; they were intelligible 
and altogether worth while. But all of the really great 
portraits of sixteenth and seventeenth century Eng- 
lishmen were painted by foreigners, and in no other 
kind of art was there any appreciable interest. Ho- 
garth inaugurated a new era. His paintings and en- 
gravings represented ordinary life, usually on its sor- 
did and brutal side, and they were done with a marvel- 
ous power and vividness. In him art and the English 
mind met on common ground. Religious or fanciful 
paintings such as had expressed the genius of Florence 
and Venice would have left eighteenth century Eng- 
land cold and unresponsive. But these pictures of 

recommended to turn not to his complete works but to Matthew 
Arnold's Selections from Wordsworth (Macmillan, Golden Treas- 
ury Series) prefaced by his immortal essay on the poet. 



174 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

London streets, these presentations of ordinary London 
life, were a different matter, and suddenly the English 
soul awoke to the wonder and the power of painting. 
The ice was broken, and before the end of the century 
Reynolds, Romney and Gainsborough were building a 
noble superstructure on the foundation laid by Ho- 
garth. 

Even these painters do not show the unmistakable 
character of the English awakening to beauty and truth 
in art as do those who followed them. One who still 
thinks of the English character as hard, material and 
practical should study the landscapes of Constable and 
Turner, the fairy world of Edward Burne-Jones, the 
noble symbolism of George Frederick Watts. And 
when he does this he will see that the painters were 
revealing on canvas the same new and fascinating 
vision that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats 
were revealing in poetry. That is to say the spiritual 
life of the English people was undergoing a slow but 
mighty change of which poets and painters alike were 
the prophets. 

Moreover the appearance of a new sense for beauty 
was paralleled by an ethical and religious awakening 
that was only another side of the same spiritual trans- 
formation. In 1738 John Wesley was "converted'' 
in a Moravian meeting in London. " It is scarcely 
an exaggeration," says W. E. H. Lecky, " to say that 



THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND 1 75 

the scene which took place at that humble meeting in 
Alder sgate Street forms an epoch in English history." 
At once he began with the aid of his brother Charles 
and his friend George Whitfield the revival of religion 
that swept over England with amazing speed and 
power, a revival as fervent as Puritanism but infinitely 
more gentle, more spiritual, more penetrated with the 
spirit of Christ. And at least two of Wesley's con- 
temporaries achieved works that embodied the faith 
preached by the Methodist apostles, — John Howard, 
the pioneer of prison reform, and William Wilber- 
force, the first great crusader against slavery. Wil- 
ber force lived to see the abolition of the slave trade 
in 1807, Howard to see at least the first steps taken 
toward the relief of the unhappy prisoners of English 
jails. The wave of social progress moves slowly 
when it meets the stubborn barrier of political con- 
servatism and of privilege, but the anti-slavery and 
prison reform movements of the nineteenth century 
were the direct outcome of the work of these two men. 
The new altruism extended not only to slaves and con- 
victs but to the degraded and ignorant of other lands 
and to animals. Between 1792 and 18 13 were founded 
the Baptist Missionary Society, the London Missionary 
Society, the Church Missionary Society and the Wes- 
leyan Methodist Missionary Society; thousands of de- 
voted men went forth to carry a message of light and 



I76 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

redemption to the darkest corners of Africa, Asia and 
the South Seas ; and the whole spirit of the Rime of the 
Ancient Mariner was a prophecy of the movement that 
took visible form in 1824 in the Society for the Preven- 
tion of Cruelty to Animals. 

It was in the second quarter of the nineteenth cen- 
tury that the changed attitude of England became 
most clearly and positively embodied in outward acts. 
The most notable of these were no doubt the removal 
of religious disabilities in 1828-9, the abolition of 
slavery, the laws designed to protect women and chil- 
dren from cruel and destructive factory conditions, the 
removal of restrictions on labor combinations, the re- 
form of the criminal laws, the repeal of the corn laws, 
and the concession of autonomy to the colonies. And 
this slow but clearly marked progress in the effort to 
relieve suffering, to remedy abuses, to remove laws, 
institutions and practices that involved injustice was 
accompanied by the appearance of a group of men who 
gave voice to the new aspirations, powerful preachers 
of social righteousness like Carlyle, Ruskin and Wil- 
liam Morris, like Tennyson, Browning and Matthew 
Arnold. 

There is no better single illustration of the new ideal- 
ism in English thought than the Sartor Resartus of 
Carlyle. It appeared in 1831 and was received with 
derision by British Philistinism. Its apparently inten- 



THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND 1 77 

tional incoherence, its frequent lapses into an impossi- 
ble jargon, its grotesqueness of plan and expression 
laid it open to limitless ridicule. Yet it was an educa- 
tive influence in Victorian England that is beyond esti- 
mate. Its whole point is the assertion that the things 
we see and touch are only garments, half revealing and 
half concealing the essential realities. Clothes, cus- 
toms, creeds, institutions, governments, words them- 
selves, forms of all kinds, are of value only so far as 
they express spiritual fact. The world itself is but the 
garment of God. Our human weakness forces us to 
use forms, and the forms then acquire a certain sacred- 
ness that chokes and hinders the life that created them. 
So that all progress consists in the making and break- 
ing of conventions and institutions. We must make 
them or our life remains chaotic and formless ; we must 
break them or they become deadening shells and bar- 
riers ; and our only salvation throughout lies in seeing 
the form as form, the shell as a shell — never confus- 
ing the appearance with the reality. 

This thesis is stated in general terms, then applied 
to individual life, then applied to society. With all 
its grotesque oddities of language it was the most 
brilliant and powerful social sermon of the age. 
The outworn creeds and conventions that still tried 
to pose as necessities to law, order, religion and 
respectability were faced and swept aside in the Ever- 



178 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

lasting Nay. The truths that were emerging from 
the conventional shell, the " eternal verities " were ex- 
alted in the Everlasting Yea. Falsehood and shams 
were denounced as eloquently as truth and reality were 
asserted. And long after the death of the Scottish 
seer himself tens of thousands of the younger men of 
England and the Empire took new heart and glowed 
with new enthusiasm as they seized the truth in the 
quaint gospel of Clothes. 

Ruskin and Morris served in the same way as the 
interpreters of beauty and labor. Beauty to Ruskin 
was no longer grace and symmetry alone but the perfect 
embodiment of truth and sincerity. The Modem 
Painters, the Seven Lamps of Architecture, the chapter 
" On the True Nature of Gothic " in Stones of Venice 
laid down a standard for art that was in its own way 
as fundamental as the French Revolution in the field 
of politics or the Wealth of Nations in the field of eco- 
nomics. Art that was merely superficial, art for art's 
sake, art that represented what was untrue, insincere, 
sensual or trifling, Ruskin condemned as he would have 
condemned the same things in literature or in char- 
acter; false painting was a lie as truly as false words, 
for both were an expression of the human soul. So as 
Carlyle looked beyond the convention, the institution 
or the creed to the essential and living spirit that gave 
them their value, Ruskin re-interpreted beauty in terms 



THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND 1 79 

of humanity and life. And he took the same standard 
for all products of labor and for labor itself. 

The gospel that Ruskin preached William Morris 
endeavored to practice. Both believed that ugliness in 
a building or any work of human hands was the expres- 
sion of evil. So Morris, seeing ugliness everywhere 
about him, saw behind the ugliness the English soul 
cramped and misled, working in darkness and degrada- 
tion, needing to be redeemed not alone by political free- 
dom but by beauty — the beauty that was defined as 
the expression of man's joy in good work, not to be 
attained unless the work was good and the laborer 
happy in it. This teaching Morris tried to make clear 
and drive home by putting it into practice, by setting 
on foot a reform in the whole outward aspect of En- 
glish life — architecture, painting, furniture, wall 
paper, textiles for household use and for clothing, and 
city streets. And the movement which had already 
found expression in the growth of landscape architec- 
ture was joined to an immense if slow-moving effort to 
banish ugliness, to relieve the sordidness that came 
from ignorance and economic pressure, to make work a 
joy rather than a curse, and to extend the enthusiasm 
for beauty, sincerity, spiritual and social health to all 
strata of society. It is impossible to estimate the 
range and power of the result. The goal has not been 
reached; the pursuit of beauty is as unending as the 



l8o RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

pursuit of truth; but the impetus given by Ruskin and 
Morris never died away. The new social gospel found 
innumerable disciples whose work may be seen in 
countless cities, houses, factories and parks all over the 
world. Art has increasingly become not the luxury 
of a class but a possession of the whole people. 

In short, the last century has seen a new spiritual 
birth of the English-speaking peoples. The movement 
for democracy has become far more than a movement 
for placing the sovereign power of the commonwealth 
in the hands of the masses. It has broadened into an 
effort not only to free the people from the domination 
of a monarch or a class but to break the chains of 
ignorance, of ugliness, of falsehood, of cruelty and of 
passion. The political struggles of the past have be- 
come the economic struggles of the present, and eco- 
nomic freedom is joined to spiritual freedom. The 
chains of the spirit are harder to break than the chains 
of feudalism or of absolutism, and the process is a long 
one because prejudices are hard to break, knowledge is 
hard to acquire, and it is not easy to see the way to 
adjust industrial and political conditions to the new 
ideal. But emancipation is going on nevertheless. 

England's problem of reconstruction is therefore not 
a new one : it is the same problem that faced her before 
the war, and the war has been only an exhausting and 
tragic but stimulating and even ennobling episode in 



THE NEW IDEALISM IN ENGLAND l8l 

the long struggle toward complete social freedom, 
toward the revision of her forms and institutions so 
that they may better embody the ideals of social and 
spiritual health. The student who wishes to see the 
full force of the reconstructing effort may find it in the 
platform adopted by the Labor Party, in the last Edu- 
cation Bill, in the Ruskin University, and in every 
speech of Mr. Lloyd-George — not studied separately 
but in relation to one another. We shall not live to 
see the reconstruction completed; England moves 
slowly; but she does move, with her ancient caution 
but with her ancient tenacity, making sure of her foot- 
hold before taking each step but still advancing with 
more courage and vision than of old because the goal 
is more clearly in sight and because the obstacles are 
being one by one cleared away. 



AFTERWORD 

Nationalism and Internationalism 

Reconstruction is then fundamentally the pro- 
gressive effort to put into form the changing life of 
society. But the word is used more specifically to ex- 
press something a little narrower than this. In ap- 
pearance at any rate human progress is not an even 
flow, a placid evolution, but a series of explosions 
alternating with periods of comparative quiet, and no 
doubt it is the painful and difficult effort to replace the 
forms broken or disturbed by the explosions that has 
suggested the metaphor implied in the word recon- 
struction. With such an interpretation we have no 
quarrel. For it is of course true that a great crisis or 
shock involving a radical change in the social outlook, 
whether it comes as a paralyzing disaster or as an in- 
vigorating stimulus, will naturally involve peculiarly 
difficult problems of readjustment. The collapse of 
the Roman Empire in the west, the French Revolution, 
the Great War are shocks of this kind, and in the study 
of history they are the dramatic episodes, the ends and 
the beginnings of eras, each accompanied and followed 

182 



NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM 1 83 

by a radical rearrangement of social perspective and 
a large degree of external change. 

But the crash seldom comes unheralded, nor is it 
different in kind from the less spectacular crises of 
every day. The laws of change and growth are punc- 
tuated by wars and revolutions, perhaps, but not inter- 
rupted by them. And any permanently valid recon- 
struction — after no matter how great or small a crisis 
• — is the fruit and expression of national life, not an 
original scheme worked out a -priori in the brains of 
statesmen. For in human affairs as in all others it is 
normally true, in spite of appearances, that nature does 
not move in leaps, and that the spectacular character 
of a revolution, a victory or a defeat, hides from us 
but does not nullify the steady, orderly movement of 
social forces. A plan of reconstruction that ignores 
these permanent things in national life is an effort to 
paint the Ethiopian white, to extract the flower from 
the bulb. " Nature can be commanded " in short 
" only by being obeyed." 

One aspect of the present problem is of transcendent 
importance. Like other aspects it is not new, even 
though it seems new because seen with unprecedented 
clearness. We have dwelt on the fact that each nation 
is slowly working out its own salvation, making its 
way toward its own goal. But profoundly necessary 
as it is to realize that Italy, Serbia, France, Russia and 



184 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

the rest must be considered organic units, earnestly as 
we may hope that nationality and state boundaries may 
be made to coincide so that national progress — i. e., 
progressive destruction of outward forms, progressive 
reconstruction of the nation as a living body — may go 
on unimpeded by deformity and disease, yet it does not 
follow that national self-determination must mean na- 
tional isolation. Aristotle's dictum that man is a so- 
cial being, that individual isolation is destructive of 
individualism itself, had a corollary. The isolated hu- 
man being is, no doubt, a contradiction in terms. But 
so is the isolated social group. To separate one's 
country from the world is to court degeneracy and 
death. So that though we have been looking specifi- 
cally at the national groups themselves, seeing their 
national life expressing itself in a never ending process 
of readjustment, we must as we close add the reminder 
that as the individual finds his individualism intensified 
and enriched in society, so nationalism is intensified 
and enriched by internationalism. 

It might be inaccurate, certainly it would require 
careful definition of terms, to describe this as a modern 
discovery. But it is at least true to say that the age 
which has seen so tremendous a development of the 
principle of nationality has seen also a steady, though 
not uniform or consistent, development of conscious 
community of interest between nations. And the 



NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM 1 85 

problem has been to give this a wise form that would 
ensure growth and permanence without hampering na- 
tional freedom. So stated, the difficulty and the ideal 
alike were not realized until the horror of the War 
cleared men's eyes. But when the idea of a League 
emerged it was seen as a natural and even obvious cul- 
mination, not as a new device to meet a new situation. 

Whether the spiritual community of nations is aided 
materially by the mixture of races that has been going 
on from time immemorial is a question. Not that any 
one would dispute its value. But in aiding the move- 
ment toward the breaking down of national antago- 
nisms the " melting pot " process seems to have a very 
definite limit. The more thoroughly fusion takes 
place, obviously, the more entirely does the new na- 
tionality replace that of parents and grandparents, 
with no apparent lessening of such prejudices, narrow- 
ness or aggressiveness as the adopted nation may pos- 
sess. We must look to things other than the mere 
movement of population for the building of interna- 
tional friendship and common understanding. 

Yet there have not been lacking signs that nation- 
ality itself, with all its intensity of prejudice and fre- 
quent narrowness of patriotism, has carried with it 
the seeds of internationalism, seeds slow-growing but 
by no means barren. Again and again during the 
nineteenth century attempts were made to find common 



l86 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

principles on which all western peoples could agree. 
Of these the Geneva Convention and the Hague Con- 
ferences were only the most notable. Even the meet- 
ings of diplomats and statesmen, even the attempts at 
international agreement that had least relation to the 
great currents of national life, such as the Congresses 
of Vienna and Berlin — to take the two examples most 
discredited now by the wrongness of their principles 
and the futility of their results — were signs of the 
times. In spite of selfish and superficial diplomacy, 
in spite of sadly obvious blunders and sins, even the 
most crudely external conferences of the last hundred 
years were indications of a movement of which Met- 
ternich, Disraeli and Bismarck were unconscious par- 
takers and which had in it a mighty surge and range 
that never came within their vision. 

And let it be remembered that it is the movement 
that counts, the beneficent spread and growing power 
of a redeeming conviction and aspiration, rather than 
any definite accomplishment. We cannot judge the 
value of the international conferences solely by their 
visible fruit. Nor can we regard the tentative agree- 
ments reached from time to time as worthless because 
of the lawlessness of the past six years. It is true 
that the Red Cross alone would justify the Geneva 
Convention, that the International Tribunal alone 
would justify the Conferences of 1899 and 1907. But 



NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM 1 87 

in society as in the individual the definite, tangible act 
is only an infinitesimal part of the total life current, 
the part that comes to the surface and may be sub- 
merged again in the tempest of war. Visible signs of 
progress, welcome as they are, are after all most wel- 
come as symbols of the forces that produced them, and 
there are enough of them to point the line of advance. 
For the age of conventions and conferences toward the 
finding of common principles was the age also of arbi- 
trations, of the rapid building of a still tentative but 
nevertheless impressive system of international law, 
and of the clearing away of international differences 
by friendly negotiation. The single fact of the un- 
armed frontier between Canada and the United States, 
of the century long validity of the agreement of 1817 
for disarmament on the Great Lakes, has a significance 
that is not easily measured. 

It is well to remember too that movements quite 
outside of formal politics, efforts to solve problems 
common to all nations through religious, scientific and 
social cooperation, have a far from unimportant part 
in the same progress. Thus the earnest and even pas- 
sionate advocacy of radical schemes of social recon- 
struction has led to world wide organizations for the 
attainment both of durable peace and of universal jus- 
tice based on liberty. Many of us believe that the 
plans and ideals of the Socialists are full of flaws, 



1 88 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

perhaps even fundamentally wrong. But their specific 
platforms and doctrines are from our present point 
of view matters of indifference. They may embody 
truths, fallacies, or bewildering mixtures of true and 
false. But in any case they represent just as real an 
effort to meet a problem that is international and uni- 
versal as a congress of scientists or an ecumenical 
synod. 

Nor should we condemn Socialism for its failures 
any more than for questionable doctrines. The fre- 
quent criticisms of socialist internationalism that are 
based on the participation of German socialists in the 
war are hardly just. No matter how keenly an indi- 
vidual may feel his individualism to be dependent on 
society there must come times when he will find it nec- 
essary to put himself in opposition to this or that form 
of society and become a rebel Equally is it true that 
one may be a sincere believer in international socialism 
and yet bow to an emergency and join his country in 
armed conflict with others, even when he is far from 
sure that in that particular war his country is guiltless. 
Society, we repeat, does not exclude individualism, nor 
does internationalism exclude nationalism. In an ideal 
state, an ideal world, there would be no such conflict 
of interests and ideals. But too often in human af- 
fairs right and wrong are so intermingled and hard to 
discern that the individual, in ignorance and puzzle- 



NATIONALISM AND INTERNATIONALISM 189 

ment, has to drift with the tide or make a judgment 
that he knows is fallible. His deepest convictions 
may even be swept aside by the powerful forces of 
passion and prejudice, as a man struggling with temp- 
tation may fall time and again in the battle and yet 
win through to victory. So the weakness of the flesh, 
the power of tradition and " mob psychology " must 
not lead us to scorn of the ideal or too much skepticism 
as to ultimate achievement. Socialists have been in- 
consistent; some of them have proved false to their 
principles; but the miracle of universal consistency is 
not to be demanded as a test of value. It would be 
hard to deduce from the sins of Christians the futility 
of the New Testament. 

Our conclusion then is clear. Making all allow- 
ances for blunders and sins, remembering that social 
and political progress is inevitably slow, that even the 
best human ideals are obscured by ignorance, weak- 
ness and blindness, there is yet discernible in every 
nation of Europe a movement toward liberty, justice, 
courage in the search for truth, and altruism, toward 
a reconstruction that will more adequately embody the 
human yearning for peace, cooperation, kindliness and 
equal opportunity. Each people faces the problem 
with a temperament, an age-long education, an environ- 
ment, a social structure that are in great measure pe- 
culiar to itself. And so deep-seated are these national 



I90 RECONSTRUCTION AND NATIONAL LIFE 

peculiarities that no German may safely dictate to a 
Frenchman, no Englishman may safely dictate to a 
Russian, what should be the next step forward. 

Yet if each nation must face its own problems of 
reconstruction, building on foundations laid in past 
centuries, we may still welcome the signs that common 
grounds of universal humanity are being slowly dis- 
covered, and that international sympathy bids fair to 
replace international antagonism. The League of Na- 
tions is only the most recent step in a noble series. It 
is just as truly related to preceding efforts as each 
forward movement of the nations in their solution of 
individual problems of politics and industry. It is 
just as truly a product of national growth as the demo- 
cratic state is the product of the individuals composing 
it. And we need by no means regard it as final, or 
scorn it if it should prove imperfect. All that we 
should ask is that it may take us a little nearer to the 
light, a little farther from the darkness of the cavern. 



THE END 



INDEX 



Alexander II, Czar of Russia, 

96, 116-117 
Alsace-Lorraine, 6, 7, 15 
Anarchism in France, 49-50 ; in 

Russia, 111-112, 131-132 
Arnold, Matthew, 150, 167 
Australia, 10, 157 
Austria-Hungary, 5, 8, 11 

Bakunin, Michael, 107-108 

Balkans, 15 

Belgium, 15 

Berlin, Congress of, 186 

Bessarabia, 7 

Bismarck, 57 

Blanc, Louis, 46-47 

Bolsheviki, 134-137 

Bosnia, 7 

Breshkovsky, Catherine, 121 

Britain, 5, 6, 7; reconstruction 

in, 163-164 
British Empire, 9-10, 151-162 
Bulgaria, 7 

Canada, 157 

Capitalism, 12, 86 

Carlyle, Thomas, 176-78 

Carta, Magna, 144-145 

Cezanne, 44-45 

Collectivism, 48 

Commons, House of, 144-147 

Communism, 87 

Constantinople, o 



Danton, 38-39 
Decembrists, 115-116 
Democracy, 1-3, 7-9 
Denmark, 6 
Diderot, 38 
Dostoyevsky, 98, 101 
Douma, Imperial, 114, 127, 128; 
local, 116, 127 

Entile of Rousseau, 26-28 
England, 7; liberties of, 142- 
147; idealism in, 168-181 ; re- 
lation of with Ireland, 151- 
157 
Expansion of Europe, 1-3, 9-12 

Factory system, 12 

France, 5, 7, 9, 10; art in, 42- 

46; education in, 38-41 
Franklin, Benjamin, 142, 146 
French Revolution, 5, 14, 17-28, 

3 I_ 35> 37, 54; reaction of, on 

Russia, 95 

Geneva Convention, 186 
Germany, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11; char- 
acteristics of, 56-58, 62-74 
Gogol, Nicolai, 101 
Greece, 7 
Greuze, 42-3 



Hague Conferences, 186 
Hapsburgs, 15 



191 



I92 INDEX 

Hanseatic League, 62 
Herzen, Alexander, 107-8 
Hogarth, David, 173-4 
Hohenzollerns, 15 
House of Commons, 144-147 
Howard, John, 175 

Idealism, Platonic, 70-81 ; Ger- 
man, 69-73, 83; French, 72; 
English, 72-Z, 168-181; Rus- 
sian, 138-140 

Imperialism, 2, 10 

India, 1, 2, 158, 160-162 

Industrial Revolution, 1, 2, 12, 
13; in Russia, 96; in France, 
46 

Internationalism, 184-190 

Ireland, 6, 7, 152-157 

Italy, 4, 5, 10-12 

Japan, 9 

John Bull, 165, 166 

Kerensky, 114, 115, 133 
Kropotkin, Prince, no, 133 

Lassalle, Ferdinand, 47, 86-88 
League of Nations, 185, 190 
Liberalism in Russia, 106, 115- 

116, 124-129 
Luther, Martin, 62-67 

Magna Carta, 144 
Marx, Karl, 47, 86-88, 137 
Millet, 43-44 
Mir, Russian, 121 
Morris, William, 178-180 

Napoleon Bonaparte, 17, 18, 28, 

33, 40, 60, 79, 80 
Nationality, 1-7 
Nihilism, 96, 102, 103-5, 110 ~ 

III, 117 



Pan-Germanism, 15 
Pan-Slavism, 16 
Parliament, British, 144-148 
Peter the Great, 94 
Philistinism, British, 167 
Plato, idealism of, 70-71, 170- 

171 
Poland, 6 

Pope, Alexander, 169-170 
Protest of the Cour des Aides, 

21 
Prussia, 61, 62, 79-83, 85 



Reformation, German, 63 
Reform Bill of 1832, 148 
Revolution, English, 145 ; 
French, 5, 14, 17-28, 31-35, 37, 
54; Russian, 15, 102-103, 106- 
108, 117, 118, 124 
Roumania, 7 
Rousseau, 18, 20, 23-28 
Rudin, Dmitri, as a Russian 

type, 99, 100 
Ruskin, John, 178-180 
Russia, 1, 2, 8, 9; compared 
with western Europe, 92-93, 
98; liberation of serfs in, 96, 
116; territory and population, 
119-121 



Sartor Resartus, 176-178 
Schleswig, 6-7 
Serbia, n 

Serfs, emancipation of, 96, 1 16 
Shelley, 169-170 
Sinn Fein, 154, 156 
Slavic inertia, 98, 101-102, 105 
Smith's Wealth of Nations, 172 
Social Contract, 14, 18, 22, 24, 
26 



INDEX 



193 



Socialism, 13, 187-189; in 
France, 46-49; in Germany, 
85-90; in Russia, 125, 129- 

139 

Sorel, Georges, 51-52 

State, English and American 
theory of, 76-77; German 
theory of, 77 ; as an organism, 
77-81 ; as Power, 82-84 

States General, 17, 18, 20, 21 

Syndicalism in France, 49-53 



Trentino, 6 

Tripoli, 11 

Turgenev, 99, 100, 103-4, I21 " 

122 
Turkey, 8 

Ulster, 154-156 
United States, io, 155 

Vienna, Congress of, 186 
Voltaire, 20, 22-23 



Terrorists in Russia, 106, 117- 

118 
Tolstoy, 101, 140 
Treitschke, 82, 84 
Triple Alliance, 11 



Watteau, 42 
Wesley, John, 174-175 
Wilberforce, William, 175 
Wordsworth, 172-173 

Zemstvos, 116 



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the Versailles conference must shortly wander distraught." 

"The peace conferees took a dictionary and encyclopedia 
along for a library. They should add Mr. Powers' book — 
it would be helpful amid even a stock of universal knowl- 
edge." — The Philadelphia North American. 

"The terms of peace to be agreed upon must be based on 
the fullest recognition of the special problems and wishes of 
the associated nations. The problem of problems is the 
control of the sea. . . . These questions are discussed with 
thoughtfulness and clarity, and a wide grasp of circum- 
stances and difficulties. " — The Detroit Free Press, 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



League of Nations. Vols. I and II 

By THEODORE MARBURG 

Each $.60 

" This little book is a history of the movement in the 
United States to secure action by the United States and 
other nations, after this great world war, looking to the 
establishment of a League to Enforce Peace. Mr. 
Marburg, the author, is a student of international law, 
a publicist, and a diplomat of marked ability and learn- 
ing. . . . Mr. Marburg, with Mr. Holt of the Inde- 
pendent, was the first to move for the formation of a 
League to Enforce Peace, and has been most diligent 
and effective in promoting the League ever since. . . . 
I hope that Mr. Marburg's little book will be widely 
read." — Hon. William Howard Taft, in Preface. 

The End of the War 

By WALTER E. WEYL 

Author of " American World Policies," " The New 
Democracy," etc. 

$2.00 
" The most courageous book on politics published in 
America since the war began." — The Dial. 

" An absorbingly interesting book . . . the clearest 
statement yet presented of a most difficult problem/' — 
Philadelphia Ledger. 

" Mr. Weyl says sobering and important things. . . . 
His plea is strong and clear for America to begin to 
establish her leadership of the democratic forces of the 
world ... to insure that the settlement of the war is 
made on lines that will produce international amity 
everywhere." — N. Y. Times. 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



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